…… claims that if one doesn’t believe in dominance as an organizing principle in canine social life then they are therefore “deniers.” (BTW Lee Charles Kelley offers some excellent rebuttals in the comment section. I wonder if they will be addressed.) Meanwhile in the article Bekoff says that denying the existence of dominance is like denying the existence of gravity. However he has it backwards and in fact is unaware of just how profoundly gravity (not to mention the principles of thermodynamics and the laws of motion) are the basis of animal behavior.

Now the image above would probably qualify for most as a prototypical display of dominance and submission, and interactions such as these are why most people, layman and expert alike, find the idea of dominance substantiated in nature. And let me be clear, there is such a thing as dominance in human beings who can indeed conceptualize about rank and scarcity of resources. So for example a prison community or an absolute dictatorship would be about the purest expression of a dominance hierarchy that I can think of, and we can see that this type of social structure is the most dysfunctional kind of system individuals can operate under. Lee Kelley offers some research in his comments that back this up. And elsewhere the science of collective behavior clearly demonstrates that complexity is simple, not complicated. Social structures are self-organizing systems, sans a leader.

So then whats is going on in between these two wolves? In my view, each wolf is stimulated by the other and therefore because they are stimulated, they MUST move. And in order to move one MUST shift their weight. And when shifting one’s weight, one must project to a forward point that defines a new state of equilibrium. This is true whether one just wants to travel from point A to point B, or if one wants to engage with another living being that is the stimulus compelling the individual to move. In other words, the individual must reacquire a state of equilibrium by occupying with their body, the point around which the other body is configured. So each wolf represents the new point of equilibrium that the other must achieve. So why is one UP and the other DOWN? Because one’s anatomy is one’s destiny. To move well, one must move as a wave. A wave is how a bilaterally symmetrical anatomy moves well. This is a principle of physics, and physics, the anatomical construction of the organism so that it can move in deference to gravity, is the basis of behavior, not psychology. In other words the only way they can both occupy that point that each represents to the other, is to manifest complementary phases of the locomotive rhythm, the physics of moving well as discovered by Adrian Bejan in “Design In Nature.”

In the picture above, one individual is projecting force—the projecting phase of locomotion, and the other is absorbing force– the collecting phase of locomotion. They are literally reconfiguring their bodies so as to occupy a common point between them. Each one becomes the state of equilibrium to the other. They become the emotional ground to the other. (Furthermore I believe that mirror neurons are instrumental in how an individual maps its locomotive rhythm onto the form of another.)

Why would this be adaptive? Because if two individuals can combine their locomotive rhythms as their new definition of equilibrium, then they can “wave-couple” and this then allows them to combine their collective energies and thereby do more work. On a low level of expression this allows a hawk to ride a thermal. A higher order of magnitude is geese migrating in formation. And in canine societies doing more work means working together in order to overcome an even greater object of resistance, i.e. a large, dangerous prey animal. If they can project their combined force on a prey animal, they can compel it to move. And if it moves they can harass, harry, wound and ultimately bring it to ground and thereby occupy the point around which its body is symmetrically configured. This is how wolves make their living and allow their young a prolonged and prosocial style upbringing. It’s a hierarchal flow system, not a dominance hierarchy.

This is the only interpretation of behavior that doesn’t deny the existence and overwhelming influence of gravity on the mind of the animal. Any other interpretation is inserting human thoughts into the animal’s mind. If one believes in dominance, then they indeed they will see it. As one astute observer put it (thanks Melissa) “Your dogma is your mirror.”

There are two possible views of nature. One is as a system of disconnected parts in competition with each other. In this view, bacteria and viruses are seen solely as infectious agents of disease. Or, we can see nature as a system of information processing. Raw, sheer energy becoming information. In this view, bacteria and viruses are part of the exchange of information and on one level, on the deepest level, are therefore part of the life affirming phenomenon.

From an immediate-moment reading of animals, I’ve learned to see behavior as a function of attraction and this leads one to a different perspective on the nature of information. I don’t see information as a binary alternative between two equal choices that the animal mind attaches meaning, ponders their relative values and then makes a decision as to which one to weight. I don’t see information as something “figured out” by the individual. That would be like saying that a shopper and a merchant figure out what money is worth before they can complete a transaction. They may negotiate over how much money to pay for the item, but not what the money is worth. The “network” has already codified and denominated what each note is worth. First comes the network, the seed of which is a principle of conductivity (note that money is called “currency”) and then its structure arises around this current. The form of the network that ultimately emerges is already a foregone conclusion as its already embodied energetically in the principle of conductivity.

Likewise the immediate-moment manner of analysis renders a thermodynamic perspective of structure arising from a current so that I’ve come to understand information as energy coming into form, a form of interconnected constituents, a network. In this view, nothing of that form can be inimical to that which brings it into form. Energy enters the form, is captured and is then harnessed by its constituents to service the network. Energy becomes information in terms of the network that makes the form. It takes a network to make information, it’s not something that the constituents figure out independent of the form in which they exist. The network doesn’t emerge from the information, it precedes it in the form of a principle of conductivity. And as more energy is captured and harnessed, the form becomes more and more viable. And when the form expands as more and more energy is harnessed, certain constituents are amplified, others are discarded. This is not evidence of competition with winners and losers, but of an expansion. For example, if one wants bigger muscles, exercising breaks down tissues that then rebuild into a larger structure. Stronger muscle tissues didn’t out compete weaker ones in order to produce a bigger muscle.

Seeing canine aggression as a state of blocked attraction rather than as something fundamentally noxious to sociability, was perhaps the most seminal insight that positioned me to see this view of information. In aggression, energy (stress), that the individual has acquired from other experiences, finds its object in that other individual. Eventually, if allowed the time and space to be transferred naturally, the two individuals would entrain and thereby add energy to the network through their integrated and collectivized behavior. The network expands. I call this the function of disfunction and I’m gratified to find this thermodynamic view of behavior verified by the discovery of the “Constructal Law” by Adrian Bejan and explained in “Design In Nature.”

In the immediate-moment view nature evolves as a whole rather than as a system of disconnected parts in competition with each other. In this view of the animal mimd, emotion serves to capture and harness actual physical energies and then serves as the currency of exchange between organisms. Emotion works as a virtual force of attraction that moves according to principles of energy. Thus, any two animals, no matter their species, can potentially communicate. Emotion embodies the laws of nature so that animals can interact with each other in a way that is consonant with the way natural energies moves. This is adaptive because it allows organisms to participate in the expansion of the network. I call the process of energy becoming information “emotosynthesis..” Just as photosynthesis turns energy into matter making life on earth possible, emotosynthesis turns energy into information that makes intelligent life on earth possible.

For example I don’t believe that in experiments on intelligence the subject crows are cognitively solving puzzles in the view of information as value added through intellectual conceptualizing. Rather they are plugging in principles of physics to make the necessary connections to solve the puzzle. On the streets of Tokyo crows drop hard shelled nuts they can’t open in front of oncoming cars that then crush the shells, the crows swooping in for the feast. Behaviorism misinterprets this as high level deductive reasoning and tool use. However, it is actually an intuitive matching of resistance-to-acceleration, (the shell of the nut) that impresses an emotional charge into the body/mind of the crow, and then the car’s intensity of acceleration (the force of the car in motion), is high enough to counter the force of that charge. Mass (resistance to acceleration) and acceleration, (energy) are two complementary phenomena of the same unitary force of attraction. Matching force to resistance, mass to energy, is inborn. Probably a life time of dodging cars as they feed in roadways allowed them to make the connection of force that can overcome mass, the resistance of the shell. This would likewise how one can feel capable of moving a small round stone as opposed to a massive square boulder. One is emotional aroused to the former and inhibited by the later.

Feelings are energy converted into network information by emotion. When animals migrate rom winter grounds to a summer feeding range wherein they will reproduce, we’re seeing seasonal energies, the motion of the planets, being converted into new feelings, the urge to move as a group and then the relationship between parents and offspring. Starling murmurations are conducting this conversion process as well albeit on a much faster time scale. This is also what dogs are doing when they play and why dogs, as beings with a particularly high emotional capacity, are also particularly susceptible to storm phobias, again indicative of emotosynthesis.

In this vein I have long suspected that viruses which are capable of manipulating the genetic code of a cell, and which can move from one species to another as vectors of transmission, are actually importing information of the network, in particular its expansion, into the organism and tweaking the genomes in order to accommodate the network’s need to shift. Even plagues through their demographic impacts would affect how energies flow through the world. And so seeing nature as an interconnected information processing dynamo, I predicted that one day science will discover that even viruses are part of the information feedback loop, just as the term “junk DNA” when I first heard it in the eighties struck me as intellectual hubris of the highest order. Below we can see we’re getting one step closer to seeing nature as one network, the source of information, not something that emerges from it. Viruses are of the network, not inimical to it.

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]]>I have been expecting that “How Dogs Work” would spur a great debate throughout Dogdom. Yet the only discussion I’ve found is a review posted by Dr. Bekoff on his Psychology Today blog.

Beckoff challenges Coppinger and Feinstein’s thesis that play, specifically the play bow, represents a state of conflict, i.e. an emergent behavior resulting form two opposing motor patterns. I agree with Bekoff that the play bow is not a state of fundamental conflict with one part of the body wanting to go one way, while the other end of the body wants to go the other. In my view both ends of the body are performing a unitary function—albeit in complementary fashion that might strike one as contradictory—- in solving a problem in locomotion, i.e. having to cope with an Object-of-Resistance (O-R). But I don’t agree with the cognitive school that dog play demonstrates a comprehension of fairness, an egalitarian capacity to self-inhibit in deference to weaker partners, a theory of mind and the ability to restrain predatory reflexes out of a rudimentary moral ethic. This cognitive interpretation could likewise be applied to a cat retracting its claws and inhibiting its bite in order to toy with a mouse. But rather than finding a compassionate undertone to that kind of behavior, we think it rather cruel. In my view the play bow reflects something simpler, deeper and far more significant than the cognitive school accords it credit. What I mean is that the nature of play is indeed the underpinning of a social and a moral nature, but it isn’t cognitive. It involves the very architecture of the animal mind, the nature of the animal mind as a networked-intelligence.

Bekoff also posits that play involves an individual putting themselves into challenging positions as practice for the unexpected. It’s a means of cultivating emotional resilience. Perhaps he would categorize the cat and mouse routine under that category. I know the mainstream interpretation is that the cat is setting up situations for its young to practice and this carries over into other contexts. However in “Work” Coppinger offers the example of a sheep killing dog performing a play bow before a sheep that won’t run from the dog. My question to Bekoff in the comment section to his blog was therefore, what, according to the cognitive school, is going on there? Is the dog intending to play with the sheep? Were the sheep to run would the dog go on to make play—- or to make prey? Or is the dog self-handicapping out of a sense of fairness or perhaps to increase the level of difficulty so as to develop its emotional resilience?

Despite all the lofty research conducted by the most august institutions two questions are left hanging, what is going on inside the mind of a dog—can it really be human-like thoughts? And secondly, if the cognitive school is correct, what makes dogs so singular in their capacity to perform these skills and thus adapt to humanity, are dogs more cognitively or morally developed than other species? (And if dogs are capable of moral behavior, are they therefore capable of immoral behavior? In the cognitive approach it always seems to be a one way street, only good thoughts are being thought.)

In his blog post Dr. Bekoff referenced a book: “Canine Play Behavior: The Science Of Dogs At Play” by Mechtild Käufer, as a definitive resource on the nature of play. So in the interest of making the NDT model more vivid by comparing it to the cognitive treatment of canine play, I’m going to go almost point by point through this book as opposed to offering a brief review limited to only the most salient points of distinction.

In his blog Dr. Bekoff subtitles his review —-> “Who’s Confused?” —— as a subtle dig to the clarity of Coppinger’s argument and to indicate that any confusion about play isn’t to be found in the cognitive camp. However Chapter One of “Science” begins:

“Let’s start with the bad news. There is no one definition of what play is. Although there has practically been an explosion in the number of research studies on play over recent years, no one can yet explain what the actual biological function of play is. No one has yet presented conclusive evidence of what advantages in terms of survival and reproduction play gives animals.”

Mechtild

This is precisely the point of “Work:” if there isn’t a definition, then there is confusion and this is why Coppinger and Feinstein finds more coherence with the notion of emergence. For example until science had a functional definition of electromagnetism, it was in a profound state of confusion about the nature of electromagnetism. From my vantage point of having studied behavior as a function of the immediate-moment, predicated on emotion as a “force” of attraction, dogs are able to adapt to human civilization not due to cognitive or moral capacity, but due to emotional capacity, the ability to project one’s Self into the widest range of stimuli, both animate and inanimate. This means that we will have to become quite specific about how the animal mind arrives at a sense of its Self; does it do so cognitively, or emotionally? What’s the difference between emotion and cognition?

Because behaviorism and ethology thinks of adaptiveness solely in terms of survival and reproductive success, it is thereby unable to come up with a functional definition of play, aggression, sexuality, or emotion and consciousness for that matter. The cognitive approach relies on neurology and requires the animal to have a cognitive comprehension of its Self. There is ME and then there is OTHER than ME concept of cognition. The ethological approach relies on neurology and requires emergence but that of course still leaves the question open and in fact unexamined as to what is going on inside the body and mind of the dog. Thus the cognitive school can’t interface with the ethological kind of analysis as articulated by Coppinger.

Whereas in an immediate-moment method of analysis, a given action is adaptive not because it results from some random variability in a trait that increases survival or reproductive success. Rather survival and reproductive success follow on the heels of the true metric of adaptiveness that I will be emphasizing in this post: the Drive-to-Move and the Joy of Moving Well. (The cognitive school’s interpretation of animal behavior would be akin to saying a business survives by generating some random degree of variability in its product line from which consumers can choose until the company hits on the right mix in their offerings to the public. This isn’t true in the evolution of a business any more than it could be true for the evolution of an organism. A business moves as fast as possible to give consumers what they want. It’s not a random process. The survival of the business and its brand value (replication) follow from moving well in regards to consumer demands. And the best way to move well? Networking that has an immediate-moment feedback component tuned to the consumer’s desires.

In evolution an action is adaptive if it is an efficient discharge of energy, i.e. force. The animal is able to move well. It’s the disposition of force that renders a behavior adaptive. If an animal moves as efficiently as possible toward what it wants, or as efficiently as possible away from what it fears, in other words if it can move well in any given circumstance, (specifically, executing its species’ locomotive rhythm as defined by the Constructal Law——“Design In Nature” by Adrian Bejan) then it is doing the best that can be done in any given situation. This is the essence of adaptiveness. Furthermore, all sub-movements are but modifications of this prime, master motor pattern because they immutably lead back to it, and are subsystems to the main system of moving well, and so seemingly unrelated movements lead back to the main channel like tributaries to a watershed’s central river. The disposition of FORCE—the degree to which it approximates the locomotive rhythm, is the gauge of an actions’ rein-FORCE-ment value, be it learning in the short term on the individual level, or in the selection of any given trait over the long term on a species’ level.

Physically, moving well results from flexing of the body in a wavelike manner. Moving well means making a wave with the body. Moving well, behaving adaptively, is wave making (as is prey-making, play-making and sex-making.) And again all sub-movements are derivative of the master wave since the body evolved in deference to the locomotive rhythm as per the Constructal Law. The animal mind always wants to return to this rhythm of movement just as a song returns to the melody that drives it refrain after refrain because this brings it to the highest form of adaptiveness, wave-coupling in order to render Free Energy.

Wave making emerges from laws of nature, i.e. the specifics as to how a body in motion responds to resistances in order to sustain forward motion. Moving well, which again did not evolve through a winnowing of a randomly generated variability in traits of movement by natural selection, increases an organisms chances of survival and reproduction. Wave-making (moving well) means coupling the wave-making muscles of the hind end with the wave-making muscles of the front end.

Meanwhile the cognitive approach is predicated on a set of related and completely untested assumptions. These are assumed as a self-evident given and then experiments are interpreted through this untested and unexamined bias. (1) The ASSUMPTION that an animal is a self-contained agency of intelligence. (2) The ASSUMPTION that intelligent and creative animal behavior is driven and guided by intention rather than attraction. (3) The ASSUMPTION that a dog sees its Self as separate from its surroundings. (It follows from these assumptions that genes are the basic unit of information, a view that Coppinger successfully challenges.) If one investigates dog behavior from this set of assumptions, not to mention the matrix of other assumptions that come along for the ride, then one will necessarily interpret play behavior through the cognitive lens. A clue that this interpretation is blinded by bias is that it does not lead to a functional definition.

On the other hand one could experiment with another set of assumptions and see where these lead. These related assumptions are: (1) The animal mind is network-enabled. (2) Behavior is a function of attraction. (3) A Sense-of-Self is a function of its surroundings. This will lead us to the animal mind as an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic, a notion that is completely consistent (and then some) not only with the growing understanding of intrinsic rules, accommodative processes and emergence, but additionally with the Constructal Law. This analysis reveals that a principle of conductivity, the basic current around which the entire network configures, is the most basic unit of information. No other analysis of behavior is capable of this which is why Constructal law is not discussed in behaviorism and Coppinger’s argument against high cognitive intelligence in play isn’t being discussed much either. We should also note that the easiest way for altruism, cooperation, loving relationships and morality to have evolved is through a definition of the Self as a network-enabling function of its surroundings. This model follows seamlessly from the laws of nature to the emergence of complex social structures and behavior. This model allows us to draw a line between emotion/feelings and rational thought, i.e. the capacity to compare one moment in time to another, one point-of-view to another.

In the absence of a distinction between emotion and instinct, feelings and thoughts, context analysis according to human rationales become paramount, as opposed to the explicative power of a principle of conductivity.

“For this reason, most definitions limit themselves to describing as precisely as possible what happens during play. In the absence of a functional definition, such a structural definition provides a useful rule of thumb for separating canine play from other activities such as stereotyped behaviors or ritualized aggression that, at first glance, appear to be similar.”

Mechtild

The above reflects the error of the bias for intentionality as explanation for purposive behavior. For example, if behaviorism were applied to a river way, it would divine different dynamics for the rapids, the pools, the shallows, the delta, even though all these features from the river’s headwaters to where it meets the sea are of course operating according to the same principle of conductivity. The principle of conductivity varies the river’s behavior, not the context of the surroundings. In fact geologically speaking, eventually the surroundings succumb and are shaped by this same principle of conductivity.

On the Nature of Emotion

As a basis for critiquing step-by-step the argument in “Science” I would first like to review the immediate-moment fundamentals of emotion (interestingly the nature of emotion also escapes a functional definition in the cognitive and ethological approach) so that we can have a functional definition of play already in hand as we proceed through the material.

The immediate-moment manner of analysis begins with an understanding of emotion as a monolithic (just as there aren’t many drives, or many gravities, there aren’t many emotions either), virtual force of attraction, universal to all animals because it derives from the laws of nature (which all animals are subject to and evolved in response to) and thus enables the evolution of a network since all animals at their core (beneath species-specific instincts) operate according to a common code.

Emotion = Motion

When stimulated an animal feels compelled to move. It MUST move. This is the most basic fact of emotion which is not been given its due influence due to the above set of assumptions. The cognitive approach immediately leaps to a cognitive interpretation to accord informational value to emotional states and so doesn’t approach emotion from this basic fact. So if an animal is restrained or constrained from movement, it experiences stress. (There’s one seeming exception when not physically moving feels like moving, as in collecting in order to accommodate objects of resistance into the locomotive rhythm, as for example the play bow.) And in order to move an animal must shift its weight. To shift its weight it subliminally references its body’s center-of-gravity relative to the force of acceleration it is experiencing, (the combined momenta of all moving objects in the frame of reference—-as an aside, something new, a sudden change in the perceptual field, even though it may be motionless, is nevertheless perceived as a moving object with its force of acceleration equivalent to the degree of mood displacement.)

Emotional momentum is the amount of physical momentum in the system in toto i.e. the movement of the subject plus the movement of the object of attraction, in other words, the amount of physical momentum that must run to terminus to return the frame of reference to a state of neutrality. For example, if one plays baseball and goes to field a ball to throw out the batter, one must automatically compute the total momenta in the frame of reference, the speed and direction of the ball, relative to their own speed and direction, with both held relative to the speed and direction of the base runner. The total momenta in the system is autonomically computed so the ball is caught and then thrown to the base ahead of the runner. This total value is emotional momentum, i.e. holding a feeling for all the elements in motion at the same time. This computation is predicated on the fielder’s subliminal reference on his own physical center-of-gravity as opposed to being derived from a mental capacity for abstraction and deduction, i.e. holding a theory-of-mind for the base runner.)

Because the Subjects’ sense of its center-of-gravity (p-cog) is constantly under the influence of the stimulus (until it is neutralized then it is constantly displacing the subject’s sense of its physical/emotional equilibrium) this means that the stimulus, the object of attraction, is being emotionally imported into the Subject’s very being, i.e. its sense of Self, via the Subject’s subliminal beam of reference on its c-o-g. The subliminal focus on the C-O-G puts the COGnitive into consciousness as a physical being cannot be aware of its own center mass unless acted upon by an external force (either by moving within a gravitational field or by being the object of a force) and all conscious awareness is predicated on the body’s position relative to its center of gravity which is also subsequently subject to the influence of emotional momentum. In other words, once accelerated, where the p-cog is GOING TO BE, a Forward Point, is far more important to the animal’s well-being than the point its body is actually occupying at that moment of acceleration. That forward point—- a potential point, an “absential”— is more essential to emotional equilibrium than an actual point. This Forward Point is the basis of Emotional Projection. And connecting the actual point with the potential point by way of a smooth wave function is how a stimulated Subject returns to a state of emotional neutrality.

Due to the equivalence between emotional and physical equilibrium, therefore an animal perceives an object-of-attraction as an extension of its Self, rather than as a separate entity relative to its Self. Any object of attraction contains a Forward Point that the Mind must occupy with the body. This is what I mean by a feedback loop with an auto-tuning component.

The goal now becomes to tune the O-R to the locomotive rhythm. In other words, to accelerate it and get it to conform to a pure wave form. This is performed through Newton’s 3rd Law of motion, i.e. projecting some degree of energy (muzzling, pawing, humping, grabbing, etc.), and then absorbing the energy projected by the Object when it responds. If Output can be equalized to Input, i.e. Projecting equalized by Collecting, then the O-R is perceived of as being of the Self. This is why play is a mirroring process, it’s a constant manifestation of the 3rd law of motion so as to compute a wave. If the Subject can get the Object to fully convert the force of acceleration into a smooth wave function (the locomotive rhythm as the tuning component of the emotional dynamic) through syncopating its actions with the Subjects’ actions, then we enter a new domain of apprehension. The Subject feels as if it can WILL the Object to move, just as it can WILL its own limbs to move in order to run. This is why dogs play. They FEEL their partner is a physical extension of their own body. It has absolutely nothing to do with Theory of Mind. In fact that idea completely obliterates the magic of what is really transpiring. Each self-limits in order to conform the input to the wave form and hence maintain the feeling of flow. (This is what is so limiting about the cognitive approach, it’s trying to reduce the melting of personal boundaries back to a unitary Self as a function of neurons and neurotransmitters.) The dog feels its Self as an extension of what it’s attracted to, one mirrors the other. The question of this merger revolving on doing to share a common emotional center-of-gravity, revolving around a midpoint.

It’s not that there is a selective advantage to play, that this or that skill set or neurological state is enhanced, rather, it is the expression of the most basic unit of information, the network, that makes it adaptive. Play is the expression of an already adaptive nature. It’s like walking into Starbucks and ones’ smartphone automatically accesses and syncs up with the shop’s WiFi network. It’s just what a smartphone does as a reflection of its networked nature.

PLAY IS THE MANIFESTATION OF THE ANIMAL MIND AS AN AUTO-TUNING/FEEDBACK DYNAMIC. THE OBJECT BEING PERCEIVED AS AN EXTENSION OF THE SUBJECTS’ VERY BODY. This is especially pleasurable because it takes an external trigger to access physical memory and so play is an interaction wherein the interactants don’t have to hold back and can express stress through a pure wave motion, in other words, to return stress to an expression of flow. This is a much cleaner explanation for the phenomenon of play than either the cognitive or the ethological approach and furthermore it specifically addresses what’s singular about dogs, i.e. dogs can map their locomotive rhythm onto complex objects of resistance and in contexts of a high rate of change (accelerants) that overwhelm other species of animals who revert to instinctive reflexes to cope with an overwhelming rate of change, BECAUSE DOGS CAN PROJECT A FEELING FOR THEIR P-COG ONTO OBJECTS-OF-RESISTANCE under the broadest range of circumstances,this also accounts for why dogs are so sensual, social and AGGRESSIVE. These are not separate systems as in detached from the main system even though they may be serviced by different neurological structures. That would be like saying the Wabash river isn’t related to the Mississippi River because it doesn’t drain directly into the Mississippi and occupies a different space on a map.

Once the play mood is established, the goal now becomes to DRIVE the system, to increase the intensity of the wave form, to collectively amplify the expression of force into that wave form that subject and object compose so that this heightening of the wave can conduct the full measure of energy available to the individual, i.e. to release and resolve each individual’s stores of unresolved emotion (stored forces of acceleration ever experienced) held in the body/mind which also serves as an emotional battery. If at any given point, the intensity of this escalation proves too much for any given individual’s emotional capacity, then it must reacquire a feeling of emotional equilibrium by timing out, smelling the other interactant, shaking it off, or deflecting its attention onto another path of resistance (pick up a stick, look off to the horizon). Often we see a dog eschewing syncopated action and begin to zoom-zoom when it approaches its break down threshold (also fights can erupt at this point) and then it becomes the Chasee. This often leads it to find a safe spot as manifestation of a Forward Point, and now this then can serve as an emotional midpoint around which the group begins to reorganize and re-integrate this individual into syncopated wave making.

Being able to integrate the highest levels of intensity into the playful mind, means that a dog can remain soft and we would observe an enhancement of certain neurological systems and hormone dynamics, but again the point of play isn’t to enhance these structures per se, otherwise many more species of animals would be as adept at play as dogs. The enhancement of these systems is a manifestation of an underlying emotional dynamic, not the other way around, just as a river is constantly improving its bed by complying with a principle of conductivity.

Whenever Coppinger inquires into the nature of the dog, conventional thinking and cherished romantic notions are quick to fall by the wayside. In “Work” Coppinger has pushed the limits of the current paradigm to its breaking point, which is why it is a seminal book. Yet at the same time, the power of his argument ends up begging a far more fundamental question. I’m writing the following post to ask and answer this deeper question and in the process this will draw distinctions between my argument and Coppinger’s. Nevertheless I don’t want to present a critical tone. “Work” is a ground breaking book and interestingly there doesn’t seem to be much discussion of it in dogdom. I wonder why. Given the strictures of the current paradigm I appreciate Coppinger’s step-by-step progression and I also find his candor particularly refreshing. “Work” allows us to integrate thermodynamics and the laws of motion with the domain of behavior and cognition.

In his earlier book “Dogs” Coppinger makes a compelling case for the domestication of the dog resulting from the invention of villages and the inevitable village dump. In the dump scenario, when disturbed by the advance of a human, the most approachable of any given set of wolves would prove to be the last to leave and the first to return. In this way the suite of neurochemicals associated with the trait of approachability were inadvertently being selected for since these more approachable wolves would end up getting more to eat. Eventually, and a Russian fox breeding experiment reveals that it wouldn’t take much time, the “village dog” emerges. However, since selecting for the trait of approachability so readily produced a proto-fox-dog in the Russian breeding experiment, where then are the fox-dogs? The village dump has now been around for millennia and so Coppinger’s argument begs the question: why did only the wolf produce a domesticated version as opposed to coyotes, not to mention bears, raccoons and o’possums? There must therefore be something unique about wolves, apart from the trait of approachability, or which possibly underwrites the trait of approachability, and which made the wolf amenable to the village dump process of selection. This furthermore means that a legacy of scavenging and a state of dependency on humans can’t be what makes a dog a dog.

Likewise in “How Dogs Work” Coppinger makes a compelling case for the overwhelming influence of shape. Coppinger’s thesis is that the shape of the parts that make an organism determine the shape of the organism, determine the shape of its movements and ultimately, the shape of the mind that directs its movements. Genes don’t encode for the mind that makes the movements, rather, the mind is shaped by the shape of the “machinery” because it forms in accommodation to the range of movements available to it as it interacts with the world. Intrinsic rules of one part, adjust and adapt in order to accommodate the intrinsic rules of other parts, even the vast complex matrix of neuronal interconnections in the brain that are built up through experience develop in accommodation with these experiences. And from these interactions a new form of information as to how to interact with the external world emerges and produces new behavioral shapes. Therefore, certain behaviors that Dogdom has traditionally seen as the essence of intelligence, such as cooperative hunting, or as the quintessence of the dog, playfulness, barking, humping, giving paw, are according to Coppinger emergent shapes that are not genetically directed, have not been winnowed into shape by natural selection, but rather, emerge in a manner that makes them unrelated to the substrate from which they have arisen. These behaviors have no discrete explanation according to classic biological processes.

As in “Dogs,” the thesis of “Work” begs a more fundamental question: What is the shape of a movement, even of an emergent behavior such as a play bow, humping or giving paw? All movements have a shape, emergent behaviors as well, so is there one form to which all these other shapes are consonant with and so therefore due to a common shape, even emergent behaviors are related to the simpler substrate patterns from which they are purported to have emerged unscathed. Is there a “master shape” that all movements and therefore all minds have in common? And if there is a master shape—-is what makes a dog quintessentially a dog—-a function of this master shape? And hence, paradoxically, the capacity to effect the master shape under a variety of circumstances is in fact what makes a dog a dog, singular in the animal kingdom and yet paradoxically, is a uniqueness that is due to a general principle universal to all animals. This master shape and its functionality would therefore be revealed by the peculiarities for what dogs are especially known: playfulness, barking, howling, herding, humping, circling to lie down, make a bed, eliminate or search a grid, and most importantly; a readiness to perform specific tasks in conjunction with humans. In other words, is this master shape how-dogs-work?

Consider the phenomenon of play. In ethology play presents a problem.

“The fundamental problem for ethologists studying play behavior is, as we’ve said, that it doesn’t appear to have an obvious function. If that is right, it poses a profound challenge to the fundamental ethological premise that behaviors are products of natural selection. Remember that the logic of the Darwinian story of evolution is that selection favors individuals who move and act in a particular way because the functional effect of the behavior is to confer a selective advantage: it enables the animal to live long enough to produce successful offspring. We expect to be able to observe (or infer) and measure some immediate benefit: a foraging activity leads to the acquiring of calories that provide energy to drive the machine; a hazard-avoidance motor pattern reduces an imminent threat or risk to life; a reproductive act culminates in the successful fertilization of an egg. When you look at playing dogs, you do often see behaviors that resemble (parts of) the adaptive motor patterns that are associated with these functional activities. Chasing and biting, for instance, are commonly seen. But in play the functional goal of the motor pattern isn’t attained: a dog that chews up a slipper gains no caloric benefit from doing it. So what is the benefit of play? Why would any young animal expend a considerable— sometimes an extraordinary— amount of energy in playing if there is no adaptive payback in life? Could play behaviors have arisen for reasons other than as adaptive products of natural selection?”

Coppinger then goes on to show how the conventional interpretations of the beneficial aspects of play such as bonding, mental enhancement, reproductive advantage, don’t hold up to scrutiny. Coppinger concludes from a study of the play bow:

“In short, the “playing” animal is in conflict about its next move— and the play bow in fact looks just like a combination of multiple conflicting behavioral shapes. The lowered front end of a play bow is essentially identical to the posture of a canid moving toward prey in EYE > STALK; the raised hind quarters and rear legs are readied for quick flight. Like barking, we think that the shape of the play bow is a result of the animal being in two motivational states at once: it is moving toward a prey object but unable to transition into the normal next step of the predatory sequence. So we don’t believe that a play bow sequence is a special adaptive (let alone intentional) signal at all. We submit that it is an emergent effect of a dog (or wolf) simultaneously displaying two motor-pattern components when it is in multiple and conflicting states. The informational uncertainty of this emergent combinatory event could well attract the attention of a receiver and increase the chances that it would engage in some way with the sender. When it is directed to conspecifics this could facilitate a social interaction that looks like play. If this is the right way to think about the so-called play bow, however, it shouldn’t be interpreted as an adaptive signal generated by natural selection to initiate play. Nor should it encourage us to conclude that play as a whole is also adaptive.”

So, what then is the shape of two dogs playing, or in fact, of any given movement? Better asked—-What is the shape of moving well? Let us return to thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is the movement of heat, force, mass and energy. Until the Constructal law (as detailed by its discoverer Adrian Bejan in “Design In Nature”) the movement of heat, force, mass and energy was merely discussed in terms of quantitative analysis given the fact that energy always moves from a pole of high concentration to one of lesser concentration, it moves from that which can project heat, force, energy, to that which can absorb heat, force, energy. One pole has energy to give, one pole has energy to receive. Before Bejan no one cared how it got there, just how much arrived and what work might be done along the way. But as Bejan puts it, that’s like saying someone travelled from Paris to Milan without specifying how they travelled, by plane, car, train, bike? Since Bejan was designing circuit boards with conductive grids to move heat away from the machine as efficiently as possible, he had to care quite a bit about the precise path heat had to travel and in so doing he discovered a fundamental principle when he realized that he solved the problem the same way nature always does, via the Constructal law. This law reveals the precise structure of the most efficient movement—-a branching, vascularizing architecture that connects a point to an area and an area to a point so as to move more force, mass and energy farther and faster with less and less effort. This minimizes loss to the various resistances that impede movement. This is a universal “design” for all configurations whether they be animate or inanimate, whether there are naturally occurring or man made because this is the only configuration which can persist given the realities of thermodynamics and nature’s law of construction.

Furthermore, Bejan discovered that an animal’s organs in their size and internal placement evolved to their particular specification in deference to its “Locomotive Rhythm,” the particular style of flying, running or swimming that moved the most amount of mass, further and faster with the least expenditure of energy. The shape of this movement determines the size, functionality and internal configuration of the body’s organs. So Coppinger’s thesis of shape being all encompassing is consistent with the Constructal law and this linkage is a huge advancement in the discussion on dogs given that we now have two front line scientists from different disciplines advocating for thermodynamics as the most important filter for the evolution of behavior.

My theory is that the locomotive rhythm is in fact the master wave because it is how an animal moves well and moving well towards something one wants, or away from something one fears, is the best an animal can do in any given set of circumstances. It’s therefore the basis of an animal’s sense of well-being since its mind evolves as a function of the shape of its movements. These shapes formulate its construct of reality and a sense-of-self, i.e. how various movements affect its integrity. The mind is shaped by the locomotive rhythm, a wave, the most powerful wave an organism can generate.

The only way an organism can move, especially mammals given that their body plan is bilaterally symmetrical, is to make a wave. A horse running, a bird flying, even a protozoa flagellating, are all wave making. Minor movements are subsets of this major movement since the functionality of any movement is to return an organism to a state of well-being and homeostasis. (Interestingly, bilateral symmetry evolved either simultaneously, or perhaps even before the evolution of a centralized nervous system. There can’t be one without the other. So the evolution of the nervous system was shaped by the mandate of the body having to generate a wave action in order to propel the organism in accordance with the Constructal Law.) And as the mammalian mind evolved over the millennia in response to how the body moves, and since the optimal shape is a wave form, specifically the Locomotive Rhythm, then the mind itself is a function of a wave, and objects come to mind as a function of a wave.

The locomotive rhythm is a wave composed of two phases. The projection phase is when force is projected through all four legs being extended outwards. The collection phase is when all four legs are retracted so as to gather force back into the body in preparation for the next stride. At the peak of these two phases is a beat of physical suspension when all four feet are off the ground. In order to execute a perfect locomotive rhythm and attain and sustain a state of physical suspension (how an individual recognizes a perfect locomotive rhythm) both the projection and collection phase have to be perfectly symmetrical. Collection must precisely match projection as otherwise ground is neither covered efficiently or the body in motion becomes physically unstable. Uneven ground or obstacles require varying these phases in order to find the best possible rhythm that most closely approximates the optimal gait. It may be that the individual has to stagger step or extend a stride by momentarily decoupling projection from collection in order to successfully navigate the ground that needs to be covered. Decoupling one phase from the other in order to negotiate a situation is the essence of locomotive adaptability, which by logical extension is therefore the essence of behavioral plasticity since the shape of the body and the shapes of its movements shape the development of the mind. The wave form varies in order to accommodate obstacles in the surroundings and so the mind must likewise fabricate a wave form in order to accommodate stimuli in the surroundings.

So if one takes the most important points of Coppinger’s book which focuses on how complex behavior emerges from simple rule based actions, with the shape of movement being all encompassing over every aspect of mind and manner, and merges this with the Constructal Law which precisely details the wave form and how the mind, body and evolutionary processes are in service to this wave, and finally the NDT principle of emotional conductivity (Emotion as a function of attraction …. then becoming Unresolved Emotion due to the influence of resistance ….. and then becoming Resolved Emotion through collectivized behavior, E—>UE—>RE) ….. we can thereby follow the thermodynamic principle of “Work” to its logical extension and understand the true basis of play, sexuality, personality, hunting, collectivized group activity, all of which are a function of the master shape to which all body forms are encoded to fulfill because in service to achieving this rhythm they will end up constantly improving the flow of heat, force, mass and energy. Understanding that physical shapes determine physical movements and therefore mental processes, we can use the principles of thermodynamics to probe Input (perception)—-Throughput (processing)—-and Output (performance) on the most fundamental level of its very architecture.

In thermodynamics energy moves from a pole or place of high concentration, to a pole or place of lesser concentration, in short, from warm to cool. Behaviorally, there is one simple rule that renders two prime emotional values. Emotion moves from a pole of high concentration (-) — a predatory aspect —-> to a pole of lesser concentration ——> (+) —a preyful aspect.

A stimulus that cannot be accelerated and/or projects force (-), thus interrupts the flow of emotion and we can categorize such objects as “predator energy”. Predatory aspects have momentum “to give.” Thus if a rock rolls down a hill toward an animal, it perceives the rock as if it is a predator advancing toward him. The animal need not entertain the concept of danger, or the cognitive idea from Plato’s cave of a predator, just how much momentum his body and mind can absorb without collapsing an emotional state of attraction.

In contrast that which can be accelerated, is “prey energy.” Preyful aspects have momentum to absorb. If a predator stares at a rabbit, and the rabbit runs, it has been emotionally accelerated and can absorb the predator’s momentum. So if an individual avoids that which cannot be accelerated, and consumes that which can, then one has a simple program for not running into trees, avoiding predators, staying out to the path of rolling boulders and eating anything that can be accelerated and tastes good. And since achieving the locomotive rhythm is each and every organisms’ auto-tuning feedback metric for adjudging its surroundings, this additionally means that moving in sync and in alignment with emotionally relevant objects that can be accelerated but can’t be eaten is even more satisfying (according to the Constructal law, incorporating objects of resistance into the configuration is the source of evolutionary progress) than consuming said object. In other words: Input—>Throughput—>Output can be summed up with a simple rule: If you can’t eat ‘em, join ‘em.

This also means that objects are assayed in terms of their capacity to match one’s inborn locomotive rhythm. Objects would arise in the mind, the mental process of objectification, as a function of their resistance to the locomotive rhythm. So each object would fundamentally be a statement of its conductivity, i.e. how easy it is to sync up with it. For example, a goose would be inherently drawn to another goose because their body shape, the object as a function of resistance to its sense of flow, proves conducive to aligning and synchronizing with it since the shape (and hence the movements this shape can generate) is a statement of its own locomotive rhythm. This means that in addition to an early imprinting process, a compulsion to mirror the movements of its fellow geese will emerge later in life. Hence birds of a feather are drawn together and have an intrinsic basis for self-organization and in a matter that is evolutionarily rewarded since more mass is going to be moved farther and faster as opposed to singular action. While this may be emergent, it is still a function of the simple underlying principle of emotional conductivity of force moving toward that which can absorb it. The complex behaviors are directly related to the substrate and are evolutionarily adaptive even though they serve no discrete adaptive purpose in the short term, for example, tens of thousands of starlings expending vast amounts of energy in a murmuration for no obvious return. Nevertheless their behavior is adaptive because it reveals that their minds are organized in accordance with the thermodynamic mandate to move more mass faster and farther with less and less energy. The herd, the pack, the flock, the swarm, physically manifest the Constructal law as a branching configuration that saturates and vascularizes its surroundings. In this vein we can recall the National Geographic documentary which detailed how reintroduction of wolves changed the course of a river in just six years.

Below this network level of adaptability, how else is wave making adaptive? First, as per the Constructal Law a wave-like manner of movement optimizes the reduction of resistances so that movement is efficient, the individual can move their body farther and faster and with less expenditure of energy. Furthermore, since moving as fast as possible toward something one wants or as fast as possible away from something one fears—-is the optimal response for life’s most graphic moments, this means that as mentioned earlier, a wave function is a the foundation for an organismal, homeostatic sense of well-being. It becomes an auto-tuning feedback dynamic for assigning emotional values to things and making sense of the world without a high-level cognitive construct of data.

Secondly wave making is predictive, it is a modeling program. Since waves are periodic, and since a wave function imprint is the basis of the mind’s architecture, therefore where an individual finds themselves on a wave (peak or trough, ascending or descending) can serve to adjudge where another stimulus happens to be on a wave since every object comes to mind in terms of a wave. Thus the mind has an inborn capacity to predict where forms in motion are going to be. (In a thermodynamic interpretation of behavior, information is form-in-motion, hence to understand the nature of information I prefer the term: “Informotion.” ) When one watches two dogs at play, which in toto unfolds along the template of a circle, the slower dog quickly learns to cut off the faster dog at a point along the circle’s circumference. He doesn’t figure it out, he feels it, the calculus of momentum is built into an emotional state just as the geometry of a social configuration is built into a feeling. (Again in this vein, temperament, the predictive faculty of wave-making, should be renamed “Temperamotion.”)

Third, there is an order of adaptability many magnitudes greater than these preceding two benefits, and which emerges from them. Wave-Coupling.

Wave-Coupling is the gateway to FREE ENERGY, the ultimate gold standard in any behavior’s adaptive value. Coppinger specifically profiles this phenomenon in a discussion of the iconic V formation of migrating geese. Because geese are large birds and soaring is not a viable strategy for their migratory needs, they learn to draft slightly off to one side of a forward goose so as to significantly decrease the resistance they face. The V emerges as the simple consequence of this thermodynamic, aerodynamic consideration. By coupling their collective wave forms together, they capture and harness free energy drafting in each other’s wake and thus move their big bodies farther and faster and with far less expenditure of energy.

However, to conclude that this thermodynamic reality doesn’t carry a real social overtone I believe is in error. I’ve seen a flock of geese circle around and around a lake bedeviled with tricky winds, trying to land in formation. Around them other wild fowl were dropping in easily one-by-one whereas this large flock of geese didn’t decompose but instead circled round and round, honking in a progressively agitated manner, apparently because they felt compelled to land as if they were a jumbo jet with a 200 foot wingspan. I believe this social imprint would carry over into many other ways their minds process informotion.

Now with these three adaptive values in mind, let us return to the phenomenon of play.

Coppinger concludes:

“Play behavior in and of itself, on our view, is not an intrinsic behavioral property of dogs or other mammals— not a special evolutionary outcome shaped by direct selection as a way to practice adult behavior, or as a mechanism to provide pleasure, or a means of reinforcing the domestic bond between dogs and humans. Rather, we think, the seemingly mysterious and ‘protean’ nature of play in mammals like the dog is a fortuitous emergent consequence of the development and interaction of other behavioral systems. It arises from the random combination and recombination of fragmentary components of behavior that appear during juvenile metamorphosis— an emergent “by-product” that comes about from the interplay between simple, fragmentary behaviors turning on and off at overlapping times in development.”

Random? In “NDT” I likewise argued that cubs aren’t playing in practice for the hunt (for one thing deer when they feel safe, play like dogs so therefore they would have to be practicing to be the hunted.) Since the brain with its vast matrix of interconnected neurons is shaped by the shape of the movements the body makes, and the optimal movement is a wave, the mind that emerges must also be a wave function, not a random emergent process. The mind would develop to be attuned to its species specific locomotive rhythm, the optimal wave form that minimizes the resistances impeding efficient movement. Thus objects that are emotionally relevant are adjudged according to their impact on an animal’s capacity to move well. (Try herding a straggling chicken into the confined space of a coop before she’s ready to call it a day.) This means that objects are formulated in the mind, the input from the senses is organized into a specific shape, in terms of a wave function. Objects obtain relevance and value in terms of their coherence with wave propagation. Objects are composed of predatory aspects which resist, if not interrupt and collapse the wave form, (i.e. an emotional state of attraction). And/or they are composed of preyful aspects which absorb and conduct the wave form. The simple rule being, can I be in contact/proximity with this object and still move well? Moving well means food, safety, pleasure, sensual, tactile affiliation, well-being. Not being able to move well means danger, compression, fear, disconnection, collapse of homeostasis. My theory is that all motor patterns revolve around this central dynamic of moving well. Indeed shape is everything.

So while the play bow is not intentional, and while it is also a state of conflict (albeit a positive versus a negative state of contrasting) because the way forward for the playful dog isn’t 100% clear, nevertheless it is not the emergent result of a random coupling of motor patterns diametrically opposed to each other. The play bowing dog isn’t in conflict about going forward versus going backwards. Rather, adapting one’s body to the shape of the wave that another animal’s body makes, just as the body in motion adapts to vagaries of the terrain, IS the basis of adaptability. Wave coupling is the basis of moving well when dealing with resistance.

Coppinger shows a picture of a dog with a sheep killing history, performing a play bow before a sheep that apparently won’t budge. Obviously the sheep killing dog isn’t intending play (less obviously perhaps neither does a sheep killing dog intend to kill a sheep). However what behaviorism and the cognitive school of interpretation call a play bow, I call “collecting.” The “play bow” is the collecting phase of the locomotive rhythm, decoupled from its complementary phase of projection. The sheep in this picture is doing the projecting (due to the phenomenon of emotional momentum as a function of the physical memory of motion), and this leaves it to the dog to perform the collecting phase in order to incorporate the object-of-resistance into its locomotive rhythm, in other words to reset its metric of its well-being and reacquire the wave form that is its predictor of ultimate success.

This interpretation addresses three questions: What is going on inside the mind of the dog, and why would such a behavior have the tendency to promote play in others, and why do human observers find play endearing?

The play bow is not emergent in the sense of not being related to the substrate. If the dog were chasing the sheep, which in Coppinger’s model would activate the Bite sequence, by running at full speed, he would be performing a very strong wave form, his optimal locomotive rhythm. So the form of a sheep in motion constitutes full locomotive rhythm and the exhilaration of incorporating all resistances (changes in terrain and direction of sheep) and subsuming these into the locomotive rhythm. The “bow” is the collecting phase decoupled from the projecting phase in order to incorporate an object of resistance into the locomotive rhythm that in this instance the dog’s can’t express because for some reason this particular sheep refuses to run. While the dog is focused on the sheep’s predatory aspect (eyes as source of force) it is simultaneously holding this IN CONJUNCTION with its preyful aspect (bulbous body plan and hence suggestive of the full locomotive rhythm) and so we observe a positive state of contrasting. The dog looks expectantly happy, an observer would misinterpret this to be an invitation to play were he not to know the dog’s history. But in the NDT model, even between two playful dogs, we don’t interpret the bow as an invitation to play. When the predatory aspect can be felt in tandem with the preyful aspect, then the individual recognizes their “self” in that object of attraction/resistance. I don’t mean “self” cognitively, only that the object of attraction responds in perfect mirror fashion according to Newton’s third law of motion, i.e. every action provokes an equal and opposite reaction. The laws of motion, the operating system of emotion, allow the individual on a deep architectural level to find commonality with objects in the world because when an object of attraction responds in this way on a feedback loop, reciprocating with the right kind of shape, the dog feels he can manipulate the object into its locomotive rhythm by fine tuning his own output.

NDT always strives toward a thermodynamic explanation (as well as the laws of motion) as the most parsimonious approach to this intelligent aspect to sentience. So to accommodate the motionless sheep, the dog opts for the equal/opposite phase of the locomotive rhythm, the collecting phase in order to incorporate the sheep, in his mind, into his locomotive rhythm. Collecting is integral to locomotion, the dog is bringing both phases into a perfect point of balance, the fulcrum being the eyes of the sheep. The dog is not in conflict about going forward. If he can’t eat ‘im, he’s inclined to join ‘im.

How does a dog know to decouple? Consider a dog coming to a fallen tree blocking a trail. He wants to get to the other side and while the height is high, it’s doable. The dog is in a state of conflict because the way forward isn’t 100% clear, but the resistance he’s encountering, the height to overcome (-), is amplifying rather than dampening his state of attraction for what he wants on the other side. He’s in a positive state of emotional contrasting, the resistance between where he is and where he wants to be, AROUSES him even more to get to the other side. So the dog will collect himself by gathering his weight on his hind end, focusing his gaze on a leverage point somewhere on the blowdown, in order to vault over his forelegs as springboards. When the degree of muscle tension in his hind end is greater than the perception of resistance, he launches. The dog responds to the resistance to his capacity to move well by exaggerating one aspect of the wave form over its complementary phase.

The dog that is collecting onto his hindquarters is not on the one hand looking to retreat and the other hand to go forward, as in the Coppinger interpretation of the play bow. Rather the dog is is isolating on the collection phase of the master wave, the locomotive rhythm. The particular body shape of a play bow is the locomotive rhythm adapting itself to an obstacle of resistance. The body is molding itself to fit with the complementary phase of the locomotive wave. Wave-making and wave-coupling is what I have heretofore referred to as mirroring.

How does a dog map the collecting phase from an environmental value such as a tree blocking a trail, to a temperamental value, such as another animal refusing to budge? Tug-of-war is one very powerful way this bridge is created wherein collecting is accorded a high strategical value in the mind of a dog. Not coincidentally, dogs love to play tug because this is such an important component of wave-coupling.

The play bow as wave-coupling has an equal/opposite inverse expression as when an owner approaches their dog and he yawns and does the “Down-Dog” yoga pose. The dog is perceiving the advance of his human as a wave moving toward him, and he collects himself to absorb that emotional momentum, like a swimmer gathering to dive through a wall of surf to get to the calm water on the other side of the churn.

The shape of a play bow or a Down-Dog wave form has an emotional effect on an observer because when a dog shifts his focus from projecting his force forward, to collecting his force onto his hind end, his wave-like body mechanics and facial expressions will transmit a discrete emotional signal that means the emotional momentum of the observer can be absorbed. Since all mammals have the same mental process of objectification in terms of a wave form, they would therefore feel encouraged to engage because the dog in a collecting state is quite likely melting the state of tension every emotional being walks about in, and amplified by a stimulus. By subliminally focusing force on his hind end, with the forelegs as springboards, this translates into lowering and minimizing his head (predatory aspect), and this reduces the feeling of pressure in an observer. And by simultaneously maximizing his hind end, which is an animal’s preyful aspect, (one can move well toward an individual who is moving away) the play bower is absorbing emotional momentum and now an observer can feel that the way forward is clear and which might incline him to engage. (Remember that any object that can come to mind, is a function of resistance to the locomotive rhythm and in order to return to a state of well-being, the object needs to be brought into concordance with the locomotive rhythm. So there is an automatic and autonomic state of attraction with anything that is emotionally relevant (i.e. can stimulate and disturb equilibrium), and this is followed by an inherent motive to accelerate the object of attraction so that the locomotive rhythm can be reacquired.) Furthermore, when an individual exhibits the 3rd law of motion, then they are safe to incorporate into the sense-of-self because they can be induced, through feedback, to conform to the locomotive rhythm. Hence they become emotionally conductive.

The third law of motion as an intrinsic rule of emotion also conforms to the Constructal law because in this way, individuals diversify according to a branching architecture of personality development, and which will then lead to a branching architecture of collectivized movements. They will not vary at random Thus a group arises and moves systematically through a region, vascularizing their surroundings with their coordinated movements. We call this territoriality.

This returns us to the notion of emotion as a modeling program. The wave mechanics of mental processing means that at a safe distance and well before actual physical contact is made, an observer can project and compute how an interaction is going to unfold. No need for a high risk trial and error since the wave form can preemptively predict success or failure in advance of in-close physical contact.

Whereas like most behaviorists, Coppinger links emotion to high cognition and intention as opposed to a simple state of attraction and so intrinsic rules, accommodation and emergence would seem therefore to be the whole story. In a discussion of rat pups huddling for warmth:

“Several researchers carried out computer simulations that utilized these rules, and successfully modeled rat huddling with abstract agents. Nothing more needed to be said about the rat pups’ emotional state, intentions, or anything else— two simple rules alone generated the grouping behavior, and adding a third rule into the simulation, to model development, changed it appropriately.”

But taking emotion out of the equation obscures the systems logic of wave-making and wave-coupling, the way by which every configuration improves itself, a dynamic which is really running the show and which is highly adaptive according to the thermodynamics by which configurations improve themselves. In “NDT” 1992 I articulated all this as the harmonic pathways of learning, i.e. waves coupled in phase to amplify force. Emergent means immediate moment. Rule driven means attraction. Harmonic pathways of learning encapsulates these concepts and more and doesn’t rely on cognitive constructs.

The immediate-moment manner of analysis does not interpret two interactants trying to figure out how to interact, but rather, trying to feel how to map their locomotive rhythm onto objects of resistance, each other . (Remember resistance is an impediment that must be incorporated into the locomotive rhythm in order to sustain a feeling of movement, i.e. well-being. If we know that Output is some form of a wave, then Input and Throughput must also be functioning in terms of a wave as the wave form is the essence of adaptability. Wave-functionality is how the animal mind construes sensory inputs into meaningful shapes.) They are trying to merge into one wave form in order to move well and reacquire a state of emotional equilibrium (displaced whenever stimulated) so as to reestablish a feeling of well-being. If they are successful, we observe two beings merging into one wave form manifested by their collectivized actions.

In point of fact there is no intrinsic rule specifying LOST—-RETRIEVE—-EYE——STALK—-CHASE—-STAY-NEXT-TO-PREY And then to encircle the prey: REMAIN-EQUIDISTANT-FROM-PACKMATES. There is no command module stating do-this and then-do-that. While these new interpretations are insightful and helpful in removing the old cognitive interpretation and calling into question the gene-centric approach (and I might add inadvertently demonstrating that all behavior is a function of attraction), what is happening inside the mind of an animal IS an emotional state, one that doesn’t derive its intelligence from a sentient awareness of its placement within a situation, a cognitive construct of reality, an intention, but rather by a feeling for the wave function that every stimulus arrives in the mind as a formulation thereof. Each individual’s feeling is a slice of an overall template, a section of a circle, a wave function, and which can best be articulated and discussed in terms of attraction, resistance and an emotional charge that accrues and not only overcomes resistance, but intrinsically inspires an individual to incorporate an object of resistance into the configuration. If you can’t eat ‘em, join ‘em.

Wave coupling is adaptive because it satisfies the criteria of every level of adaptive success, an individual moves faster and farther if it can mold uneven terrain and obstacles into a smooth locomotive rhythm, it if can coherently deal with force, both its capacity to absorb and project it, socially wave-coupling amplifies the many into one combined force that can do more work, and the network is satisfied because objects of resistance are incorporated into configurations thereby improving the network wide flow pattern.

The extent to which one aspect of the wave-making dynamic can be decoupled and then re-coupled as a complement to an object of resistance, IS the essence of adaptability. This is adaptive on every level of selection, from the individual, to the social unit, to the network. Dogs are the masters of de-coupling one phase of the master shape from another and then re-coupling in order to make a bigger wave. Since this post is so long, I’ll leave a discussion of barking, howling, humping for later, but I trust you can already see that these quintessential doggy behaviors are dramatic examples of wave coupling as well, most especially howling, the dog literally making a sound wave to resonate with another. Free energy from wave-coupling; that’s how the dog emerged from the wild. That’s the shape of domestication.

(BTW: In terms of training practicality, the Five Core Exercises are concerned with strengthening the Wave-Coupling faculty.)

Anytime a book merges canine behavior with thermodynamics (the study of how things move) it represents a milestone in Dogdom. “How Dogs Work” by Raymond Coppinger and Mark Feinstein, (University of Chicago Press) is such a book.

“It’s not too far off the mark to say that, for ethologists, what evolution really “cares about” is swimming or flying or running. Fins or wings or legs are only a means to an end. When the first marine animal lumbered or lurched onto dry land, its selective advantage was the behavioral fact that it could use some (already evolved) property of its shape and structure to move in a particular way.” Coppinger

Given Coppinger’s scientific prominence I believe “Work” will mark a fundamental shift in the behavioral paradigm because his argument can be extended to show that the shape of swimming, flying, running, and therefore behavior, and therefore the animal mind, is an expression of the Constructal law, discovered by Adrian Bejan and detailed in “Design In Nature.”

In this post I will discuss how “Work” verifies the central tenets of NDT, behavior-as-a-function-of-attraction, social structure as self-organizing, the immediate-moment basis of behavior and learning, and most importantly, a group mind arrived at as a function of movement. And then in a post to follow I will discuss the points of distinction between “Work” and the NDT model, or to put it another way, I will carry the central premise of “How Dogs Work” —- the shape of movement is everything —- to its logical thermodynamic conclusion via the Constructal Law so as to answer why dogs play, bark, howl, hump and other behaviors that elude Coppinger’s treatment in “Work.”

What’s revolutionary about “Work” is that as frontline science it moves away from a wholly gene-centric view of behavior while simultaneously pouring cold water on the current trend of seeing high cognition in complex and ingeniously adaptive behavior. Coppinger’s thesis is that the mind of the dog is shaped by the shape of its body parts, shapes that determine how these parts interact, most especially during their development in the earliest phases of life and as its motor systems are coming on line. Then, functioning as a whole, this renders a shape that determines how the body interacts with its surroundings, which then shapes how the mind is formed and operates. Thus an animal is a kind of biological machine and the interplay between all its moving parts creates its own kind of information, a shape (not only in its form but the shape created by how the form moves through space over time) that isn’t genetically based or cognitively driven, and yet informs movements that engender ever more complex shapes. Ultimately this shape can manifest into a collectivized expression that historically have been anthropomorphized and attributed to human like intellectual capacities and which thereby obscures the emergent, self-organizing nature of the phenomenon.

“The working behavior of a guarding dog is neither a product of learning nor an explicit genetic “blueprint.” Nor were the individual behaviors (or lack of them) that make for a good livestock-guarding dog the target of intentional selective breeding. Rather, their useful behavioral shape arises as a result of accommodation between the dog’s intrinsic motor-pattern repertoire and its early environment during a critical period in development. The overall accommodative shape— the right mix of intrinsic rules, the timing of development, and how those intrinsic properties respond to environmental inputs— can then be favored by selection, whether artificial or natural.”

Coppinger

Where might one have read something to that effect before? Perhaps from Chapter Five “Myths of Learning” in NDT, 1992

“We end up with a body of traditional beliefs and notions that reduce such terms as intelligence and instinct to buzzwords. An owner of a Border collie asks why his dog chases cars, and he’s told it is because of a herding instinct. Because an Irish setter can open doors, his owner believe it is due to his superior intelligence. These fables are appealing, as they conveniently provide handy explanations for the diverse and complex things that dogs can do, but they are an intellectual dead end …… We end up missing valuable clues as to how the canine mind actually works.”

I can appreciate how Coppinger’s language seems more reasonable and down to earth than my writing. It may not seem from these comparative excerpts that I’m saying something analogous to Coppinger. It’s as if I”m talking of “humors” while Coppinger is dealing with motor patterns. Coppinger says emergence, in NDT I say “harmonic pathways.” (In my next post however I’ll explore which term—emergence or harmonic pathways——proves to be more concrete and informative.

Why then is there such a gap in these respective passages, so wide that the two systems can’t interface? In my view it’s because while both NDT and Coppinger correlate on the impact of locomotion and motor patterns, when it comes to the mind of the dog, Coppinger applies abstract concepts (intrinsic rules, emergence) and mathematical descriptions to behavior, whereas I’m talking about what’s going on inside the mind of the dog itself. (Something is of course going on in there and it’s safe to say there isn’t a neurological math module tucked away in the cranium running an algorithm.) Therefore, because something is going on inside the mind of a dog, speculating and making informed determinations based on experience and reinforced with science from many disciplines; biology, neurology, emotional research and most importantly physics, is not anthropomorphizing when it isn’t inserting human, abstract thoughts into the heads of dogs. My definition of a sense-of-self doesn’t require the individual to be a self-contained agency of intelligence, anymore than an immune system requires an intellectual construct of a self in order to discriminate between that which is of the body and that which is foreign to its well-being. In my model emotional states are not thoughts whereas I believe Coppinger equates thoughts and self-awareness with consciousness rather than as aspects of same. I see emotion as a physical state of awareness through the individual’s emotional perspective of attraction, a subsequent sensual or sensitive response to resistance, and which then leads to behaviors that ultimately effect a networked-intelligence from which derives the true nature of consciousness. In other words, animal behavior is adaptive when animals move in ways that are concordant with the way forces, energies and objects of mass move in nature. This is how potential life sustaining energies are identified, captured and then harnessed.

I do believe nevertheless that Coppinger’s book in conjunction with the Constructal law allows NDT to directly interface with modern behaviorism as I strive to show below.

I would also like to reiterate that since the eighties I have been teaching that not only is there no such thing as dominance and submission, but neither is there such a thing as territoriality, and there also is no drive to survive—-there is only a drive to move and when one takes the thermodynamics of all that entails into account, this readily encompasses the survival and reproductive mandates. We could say that survival and reproductive success are emergent phenomena, just like the sheep guarding dog. I am also curious as to how the systems logic approach to the modern research of Coppinger, Dubois, Wynn, Udell, et. al. have to say about territoriality.

Finally another point on which NDT has proven to being ahead of the curve is in regards to learning. To date it’s been posited as high cognitive intelligence, as deductive problem solving as for example tool use in corvids. But my theory is that even learning, other than human linear reasoning—is also a function of evolution, in other words, it’s the same dynamic simply running on a hyper fast track. Complex behaviors have a shape. Shapes evolve into form, they don’t leap into being through a cognitive eureka leap of reasoning. Learning will prove to be rule driven according to a thermodynamic mandate, to wit: The Negative-as-Access-to-the-Positive.

And in regards to the reinforcement aspect of modern learning theory, when Coppinger talks about intrinsic rule driven biological mechanical systems—of which organs, tissues and brains are its parts— that then accommodate to each other’s development and from which complex behaviors emerge, this therefore means that such emergent actions (the basis of complex adaptive behavior) are self-fulfilling no matter what material consequences are or are not realized. Such actions feel fulfilling because they manifest the emergent virtue of being highly conductive, i.e. the parts get to work together in accord with the only way they can work together. Getting to such a state is therefore intrinsically satisfying. In effect Coppinger is talking about a principle of conductivity and behavior flowing according to paths of resistance, the essence of Drive and the central premise of NDT.

In other words, the mind of each individual is shaped by the emotional displacement of fellow group members and perception, emotional disposition and behavior precisely accommodates to the emotional mood that emerges.

When wolves align and synchronize with each other along the prey’s path of travel and thus strive to achieve a circle, then that activity is self-rewarding, it doesn’t matter whether or not they bring the prey to ground to experience a feeling of “reward” for pursuing that line of activity. the same is true of the sheep or sled dog. And this also means that wolves have no intension of killing in order to eat, this intentional goal is the projection of a human intellectual narrative of processing reality rather than an objective reading of the evidence. Bringing a prey to ground is an emergent behavior, not an intentional act. Coppinger is saying that the intellectual basis of modern learning theory is incorrect.

Nevertheless we’re both talking about a systems’ logic and I would like to reiterate that my manner of analysis (emotion as an immediate-moment “force” of attraction) arrived at these understandings in the eighties, during the height of the gene-centric focus on behavior—-the dominance explication for social structure, accredited at the time by the most august wolf researcher, David Mech——-as well as the era when Border Collies were touted as smartest breed on four legs (Stanley Coren). While behaviorism of that era was looking for the genes for aggression, I was understanding aggressive behavior as a function of inter-connected parts responding to resistance either sensually, or not, in which case we observed aggression. If I had access to the terminology as now offered by Coppinger I would have said Aggression has a shape. (In fact a chapter excised from “YDIYM” due to space restrictions was entitled the “Geometry of a Feeling.”) I don’t say this to aggrandize but to point out that an immediate-moment manner of analysis, emotion as a force of attraction, is a logical and parsimonious interpretation of canine behavior. In contrast using human concepts which to date has been the explanation of complex social behavior is the radical approach.

After exploring in “Work” how intrinsic rules help body parts accommodate to each other and render new body shapes and therefore brain and physical capacities, Coppinger turns to the phenomenon of emergence theory and canid hunting.

“There is, however, an alternative and very different kind of explanation for how some complex behaviors might arise. In this chapter, we introduce a powerful third way of understanding behavior in animals— emergence. This is an old notion. Aristotle observed millennia ago that a whole is often more than the sum of its parts. That’s certainly true of modern machines. An internal combustion engine has multiple components— chambers, valves, pistons, connecting rods, and driveshafts. These individual physical shapes are linked together, but, in and of themselves, they do nothing at all. Let an explosion occur in a combustion chamber, however, and the engine components suddenly come to life and conspire to produce motion. The true character of the machine is seen only when the parts interact: movement is an emergent property of the system that isn’t inherent in any single part. This venerable idea, in various forms and under many competing definitions, has gained a remarkable degree of intellectual traction in the last few decades in domains as diverse as physics, chemistry, biology, architecture, and human social psychology.” Coppinger

Bravo—Bravo—-Brav……oooh!!!!

From NDT 1992 (William Morrow)

“In studying the canine drive to hunt, one becomes aware of a powerful force in nature. I call it the ‘synergistic effect,’ and it is a significant element of the social bonds. A dog willingly subscribes to the group ethic not because he is altruistically inclined but because he is participating in and absorbing a higher and purer level of emotional energy than he could otherwise experience.”

During the eighties while I was working out the thesis of “Natural Dog Training,” I visualized the group as a circle, a shape, a configuration that shifts as the prey at its center shifts. If you’ve attended any of my talks you may recall the circle as a constant fixture of the white board. (It’s about the only drawing I get right.) The group is a circle, the circle arises AROUND THE PREY. In other words, the prey is the leader of the group if a leader is a concept we must apply. This same template is in effect in all interactions, between parent/offspring, male/female, peer-to-peer since emotion moving from high pressure (predator pole) to low pressure (prey pole) as a virtual force of attraction is underlying and underwriting each and every interaction.

“Yet another form of canid foraging behavior that might best be seen as a product of emergence is cooperative hunting in wolves. This phenomenon, as we’ve noted, is often regarded as an example of a sophisticated and highly complex adaptive behavior or, indeed, as a remarkable instance of animal intelligence. We’re not so sure. Ray and several computer scientist colleagues (C. Muro, R. Escobedo, and L. Spector) designed and implemented a computational model of collective hunting behavior to see what would happen when wolves and prey were represented by abstract “robots,” digital agents that were programmed to do no more than carry out two simple virtual motor patterns were both local and decentralized: an individual agent (a “wolf”) could act, or not, completely independently of the behavior of any other agent, and there was no coordinated signaling between participants. The model didn’t depend on the presence of intelligence, purposive intentional behavior, communication, or a hierarchical social structure (where, for instance, dominant “alpha” wolves might play leading or guiding roles).” Coppinger

“Once the group is coordinated along the harmonic pathways, members may act in ways that look to us like communication, hindsight, and foresight. In fact, each individual is merely following the rhythm of the prey instinct precisely in the manner his temperament is uniquely sensitive to.” NDT 1992

In other words, this capacity to shift as a whole, to accept a new midpoint, to reorient collectively to social shifts, is the same capacity to admit newcomers into the group. Or to be more specific, to admit objects of intense resistance into a new social configuration. This is the essence of sociability.

I didn’t articulate it as two simple rules, rather as emotional states of inhibition relative to arousal to bite, with each individual of the group falling out along this gradient. Since this is all overarched by a state of attraction, the movement is implicit. I speak of what’s going on in the individual mind because there is no rule-driven module running an algorithm, there is no CPU whirring away and mathematically computing what’s going on. Rather, there is a feeling, a feeling with a number of midpoints around which each individual revolves in order to satisfy a common state of attraction. Feelings have a geometry, they arise from emotion as a universal state of attraction (the intrinsic) so that they accommodate each other to maintain their configuration as a circle and thus sociability EMERGES. In other words, they are attracted to each other, peer-to-peer with the same Drive (but which can’t be consummated through social interactions) that attracts them to a large, dangerous prey. They HUNGER for a degree of physical, tactile contact that they can’t consummate interpersonally. Only by working together to overcome a large enough obstacle of resistance that can elicit their bodies moving at full speed can they move their bodies at a state of full emotional vigor. The social unit they embody collectively INCLUDES THE PREY. There is a functional “group mind” and even the prey feels its respective slice of the continuum and in fact could easily exploit it if it could feel the emotional leverage inherent in being the object-of-attraction. Each individual’s sense-of-self encompasses their peers and the common object of resistance they are all mutually attracted to. The circle they configure recapitulates the first ten days of life where their respective urges to ingest were at their strongest and at their least differentiated one from the other.

There is not even the idea that “I want to eat that Moose” as if there is a “me” and then there is an “other-than-me” construct of experience. The Self encompasses the ALL when there is a feeling of flow. Each individual will have a different perception depending on where they find themselves in that flow configuration and they will adjust accordingly but not due to rational deductive thinking. These feeling states are variants along a gradient of an electromagnetic-like nature that can be described mathematically and in terms of a systems rule-driven logic, but they are neither. For example, light propagates according to a precise mathematical formula which is how its speed was calculated in the nineteenth century and well before it was well understood. But of course light itself isn’t operating through a mathematical calculator. Emotional states and emergent Feelings are electromagnetic-like phenomena. They factor for attraction and repulsion as well as closing the gap to make contact and achieve consummation. So social systems evolve, the canine being one of the most highly evolved social systems with a prolonged upbringing and collective rearing of the young, in real time (and over the course of geological time) via the predator/prey dynamic.

As a point of distinction therefore,“Work” has sociability and hunting disconnected, whereas in NDT sociability EMERGES from hunting. This I believe is the most logical interpretation of evolution and domestication once the notions of intrinsic, accommodative and emergence are fully considered.

“collective hunting— a social behavioral shape that changes from moment to moment—” Coppinger

In other words, it emerges in the moment. If complex and intelligently adaptive behaviors arise via intrinsic rules, accommodative exigencies and emergent phenomena, then the animal mind works within the framework of the immediate moment. It is not goal driven and reading an intentional state into a behavior is a huge leap in magical thinking, literally.

If you have been following NDT theory then you are not among the “most people” referenced above. My study of dogs through the lens of the immediate-moment revealed in the late seventies that emotion is a system’s phenomenon, not an individuated one. Emotion is a network dynamic, not a self-contained one. While I’m all for reductionist research given that neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, and brain structures are indeed involved in emotional experience, (as are the gut, muscle cells, organs, tendons and anatomy as well), and we need to know how the nuts and bolts work, nevertheless one must always remain cognizant that one is being reductionist. One is only looking at nuts and bolts. In other words, the internet is not to be found inside the computer; WABC is not inside the radio. Emotion is not in the brain.

A dog learning, dogs interacting, personalities in a pack shifting over the years, these illustrate how emotion’s energetic properties and principles of movement unfold. The outside is a reflection of the inside. Even behaviors that take a long time to develop within an individual dog’s mind are still a function of emotion as an immediate-moment phenomenon driven by a systems logic. This immediate-moment dynamic becomes visible when one resists projecting thoughts into the mind of the dog. The starting off point is the assumption that an action is a function of attraction rather than intention.

Attraction renders a principle of conductivity whereas Intention always broadens out to a human psychological rationale of context. “Design In Nature” gave me the means to root my theory into a hard scientific treatment à la the Constructal Law. It allows us to say something definitive about the animal mind, to wit: Input (perception)—-Throughput (processing) and Output (behavior) is a function of the locomotive rhythm; an optimal waveform of motion that sets a standard of efficient bodily performance through which the mind constructs a view of reality, a metric of well-being and a sense of Self.

Emotion means Motion. Motion invokes the Constructal Law because movement does not occur at random. There is a physics to motion. It proceeds through an organized transfer of forces. Anatomy, physiology and psychology therefore evolved to conduct natural energies. Every aspect of the body evolved in conformance to an individual’s locomotive rhythm in order to overcome resistance, and so every aspect of the mind must do so as well. This is the most conservative thing we can say about behavior. In twenty to thirty years this statement will be axiomatic, not radical.

It’s a simple exercise in logic. If one thinks about it, no one believes that one has ever felt anything unique to themselves, that the particulars of emotional experience, no matter how nuanced or personally overwhelming, are confined to their personal experience, that never before, or somewhere else on earth at that moment, someone else has felt or is feeling exactly the same way. Every person’s experience is unique in the sense that it’s never been felt in that particular time or place before, but millions of people, and animals, have felt that particular range of sensations, sense impressions, blended feeling since time immemorial. We dip into a timeless and universal emotional spectra when we’re having an emotional experience. This is logical.

The next research shoe to drop, although it may take another thirty years, and is the most logical extension of all of the above, is that there aren’t emotions plural, fear separate and distinct from joy, separate and distinct from pride, separate and distinct from Love, etc., etc.. There is only ONE emotion, a monolithic universal “force” of attraction that invests the individual with an inherent motive to move, and invests the body with a physical momentum through that motive. If I may propose a title for this future article:

The hunt made the dog, not the hand of man. In all of Dogdom there is only one theory, model and training system predicated on the above belief; Natural Dog Training.

For thirty five years this fundamental tenet of Natural Dog Training has been running against the grain of conventional thinking and consensus science; both of which sees the dog as having been made fundamentally different from the wolf through human selection for friendliness, submissiveness, docility. Just recently, Simon Gadbois, PhD, a prominent researcher of the canine mind wrote:

“We spent centuries working on selectively getting rid of aggressive behaviour in wolves and purposively making them more docile… “

This has never been my view. In fact when breeders misinterpreted friendliness as good temperament and selected for docility, for example the Doberman Pinscher in the sixties and seventies, they produced friendly AND sickly progeny. Since dogs are ubiquitous in our world they are easily misunderstood as being understood, even by scientists.

So not only did the hunt make the dog, but it made the human as well. The truth is always more powerful than romantic or sentimental treatments. I have no doubt that in a few decades consensus science will be saying: the hunt made the dog, not the hand of man.

Since the seventies it has been clear to me from working with field, protection and police dogs that hunting; specifically, hunting a large dangerous prey, defines a dog’s makeup and its capacity to attune, align and sync up with human beings. The hunt comes first, sociability follows, not the other way around. This is why all interpersonal relationships carry the thermodynamic signature of the Predator relative to Prey dynamic, i.e. that which can project/direct force relative to that which absorb/conduct force. This is also why all the things we see dogs doing as they adapt to human ways, are actually variants of hunting, from snagging a frisbee, rounding up kids in the back yard, the joy of a car ride, the compulsion to bolt through an open door, the unbridled ecstasy of sled dogs in harness, police and search and rescue dogs, food/toy guarding, agility training, and so on. I was led to this conclusion by studying dogs as creatures of the immediate-moment, aka, emotional beings, which as it turned out is synonymous with saying social. Sociability isn’t about companionship, that’s just a wonderful derivative of the deeper group dynamic. On the deepest architectural level of the animal mind, sociability is about turning change into information. Or put another way, sociability is the capacity to turn stress into Drive. This is why when one has allies one feels empowered and why conversely, being shunned by the group can make one feel powerless. The support of friends increases one’s confidence even though they aren’t actually going to be helping in a material way. Hunting, and being hunted, makes affiliative behaviors extremely adaptive and has become ingrained in our nature.

In the nineties the Coppingers argued that an intentional process of domestication by capturing and raising wolf cubs was not possible because as soon as wolves become sexually mature they will take off to breed, never to be seen again. And since genetic change has to happen across a large population that houses the range of variation required to produce genetic shifts, and so must therefore span a multi-generational length of time, it isn’t feasible to contain that many wolves long enough to render a domesticated variant. The Coppingers proposed the village dump theory which posits the wolf as scavenger of dump sites so that the most approachable wolves became domesticated. The appeal to this theory is that domestication was inadvertent, it doesn’t require keeping a large population of wolves captive and well fed, and seems to correlate well with the behavior of free ranging dogs in villages around the world as well as with a Russian fox breeding experiment which produced a domestic like version of a fox in just twenty years. This theory also correlated with the evidence, unchallenged until recently, that the domestication of the dog coincided with humans beginning to live in villages.

However the theory fell short for me because it doesn’t account for the prodigious appetite in domestic dogs for the hunt, and most especially for the capacity of a working dog to take on the most dangerous and physically superior of all prey animals, an armed human criminal. (Thermodynamically we can call this taking the path of highest resistance.) In fact the Coppingers argued that hunting was something that had to be encouraged in dogs, they weren’t really all that into it. I found this especially incongruent given that the Coppingers are active and expert in sledding dogs which exhibit an incredible drive to work. And for what do they mush?To go from point A to point B?

In my view, their field observations around the world were showing them dogs of low drive (high drive dogs are quickly killed off by cars, farmers, people they menace) and, these dogs are also “bleached out” from having a lifestyle of total freedom. Like water not contained in a vessel they always follow the path of least resistance. Having access to garbage and human handouts they’ll never become “charged” to the point where they can be channeled into hunting in a manner of the human’s choosing.

But even if proves true that the village dump was a critical factor in the domestication process, it cannot be the definitive factor since only the wolf, of all the species of animals that frequent village dumps, was able to produce a domesticated version of itself. In my view the village dump no matter what degree it may have been instrumental, was in actuality selecting for that individual wolf who could see the human as hunting partner, not friendliness, otherwise dumps in regions without wolves should have also produced fox-dogs, coyote-dogs, raccoon-dogs just as well as it did wolf-dogs. Why only the wolf?

When one trains a dog in protection, one is both predator and prey to the dog. Too much predator, the dog becomes afraid. Too much prey, the dog also becomes afraid. But a little more prey than predator, then the dog becomes aroused and learns to love the work and bite without inhibition. In other words, one must become a “vulnerable moose” to have the right emotional affect on a dog. And I learned from this inter-species communicative process that hunting is a process of EMOTIONAL REGRESSION from the adult mind back to the infant mind under the pressure of the prey’s predatory aspect. Then, by being in sync with its group (a supportive handler petting and encouraging), the predatory aspect of the “moose” (me) is being perceived sensually rather than sensitively. Aggressive “inputs” (mock stick hits) by the helper are sensually arousing rather than being perceived as painful and knocking-off-balance. A sensual attuning to a predatory aspect is the imprint inculcated during a pup’s first formative weeks, i.e. the predatory aspect of their mother (she knocks them over) induces pleasurable emotional affects (she cleans their anal/genital area and then settles about them to nurse). This sensual affinity to the “negative” is why pups bounce back from hard knocks so easily, and then become far less resilient as adults who can be broody for days and carry a shock forever. In the infant mind, emotional oral urges are unrestrained, unfiltered, and then go on to become the basis of a whole body sensuality. Thus in the hunt against a prey that can generate intense resistance, the adult mind of the wolf is regressed back to its physical memories of litter hood, the mother wolf being the template for the moose. My model sees nature as a continuous whole, a flow system, rather than nature being a system of disconnected parts running into and grinding against each other.

Dogs are the most social, sensual, AND AGGRESSIVE species of animal on earth. And the only way to reconcile these three fundamental traits is to understand the overwhelming role that hunting played in the evolution of the canine mind and the evolution of the emotional bond between canine and human.

Meanwhile consensus science wrestles with the adaptability of dogs to human ways in the following manner:

“Is it possible that dogs are able to read and use human gestures because they co-evolved with humans, endowing them with a specialized human-like type of social cognition that their ancestors missed out on? Or, is it that dogs are such an integrated part of our lives that through our daily interactions they learn that paying attention to our body language pays off?”

Lucia Lazarowski, PhD candidate.

Her research with shelter dogs who weren’t living with humans but who nonetheless experienced a rich enough environment so that they developed normally, indicated that exposure to humans was necessary.

“Our results seem to suggest that exposure to humans and the opportunity to learn about the meanings of gestures plays an important role in dogs’ ability to follow pointing.”

But this kind of linear, binary thinking depends on a cognitive interpretation (“meaning of gestures”) will miss the obvious point of the significance of human gestures to the animal mind. What always stands between an animal and what it wants is Resistance and exposure to humans is only necessary so that the dog can become sensually aroused by human resistance, which is the most intense to be found in nature, rather than remaining sensitive and thus limited by instinct.

In the domesticated dog the puppy mind can survive into adulthood whereas as wolf cubs mature it is displaced by personality and instincts, the only exception being when the infant-mind of the adult wolf is RECAPITULATED in the hunt. This is what early man would have ended up selecting for, the most puppy-like Proto-Dog in the hunt, the most uninhibited about biting the wooly mammoth, not the most docile. This would then render a more sensual, social, AND AGGRESSIVE companion.

In “Your Dog Is Your Mirror” I posited the “shaman scenario,” wherein early man somehow connected with wild wolves in order to hunt a dangerous prey. I was drawn to this view by the example of Aboriginal whalers in New Zealand arriving at a working relationship with Orcas to herd whales into the Bay of Eden where they could be killed by humans, then to be left overnight in the water for the Orcas to feed on the tongue. This pact between humans and animals was called “Covenant of the Tongue” and was even picked up by Western Whalers in the 19th century. In the link below we can now look to the same kind of relationship currently underway between an indigenous people and land animals.

There is no other book on training that discusses the canine/human connections wholly in terms of the hunt other than “Natural Dog Training” (1992). Hunting inculcates the deepest emotional connections, not only between comrades in the hunt, but paradoxically as it might at first seem, between predator and prey as well. Emotion is the universal operating system of all animal consciousness, in YDIYM I said that if two individuals (or species) have an object in common, they can potentially communicate. And if they share an object in common that can’t be attained without the other, they can potentially connect. Emotion is a networking intelligence, domestication is just one adjunct of its evolutionary force. Its most basic line of code is “negative-as-access-to-the-positive.” This is how ravens lead wolves to a carcass they can’t open on their own, and why wolves look up and follow them. It’s one universal code and it is most manifest in the domesticated dog.

The problem with the current consensus in behaviorism is that while the experts make very reasoned cases for a number of possible explanations for the various acts dogs perform during play, such as rolling over, bowing, grabbing and chasing, they haven’t been able to find a universal to play, which I argue is the same universal that is missing in any discussion of behavior. This omission occurs because the mainstream engages in contextual-analysis rather than immediate-moment analysis. The problem with the former is that it requires that human thoughts be inserted into the animal’s mind, the advantage to the latter is that it does not. An immediate-moment analysis focuses solely on what is observed. No human thoughts are attributed to the dog in interpreting his behavior.
Because contextual analysis cannot identify a universal principle, and because behavior does indeed have one (survival and reproductive interests are human rationales that will ultimately require putting thoughts into the dog’s mind) inevitably contextual analysis resorts to a catch-all category for those behaviors which fail to be categorized. For example, in behaviorism’s examination of aggression the catch-all bin is “idiopathic,” cause unknown. In behavioral discussions of play it’s “just-being-playful”, i.e., “just-for-the-fun-of-it.”

“Rolling over during play is often just playful.”
Stanley Coren

“Instead, rolling over during play is often just playful.”
Julie Hecht

“Animals may also play because it’s fun — for the hell of it, because it feels good — during which time they’re also benefiting from engaging in the activity itself.”
Marc Bekoff

If something can be done out of context, just for its own sake, this obliterates contextual analysis as a viable method of interpretation. If rolling over during play is just being playful, then anything could be done in play, even acting dominant. “Sometimes intimidating a playmate out of their wits is just being playful.” ? ? Play for the “fun of it” could just as well be called idiopathic, and then perhaps idiopathic aggression is just for the fun of it as well. If an interpretation of a behavior depends on context, that requires putting human thoughts into a dog’s mind and this doesn’t bring us closer to answering the question, why is fun, fun? It’s self-recursive, fun-is-fun-because-it’s-just-for-fun.
In addition to contextual analysis, the consensus view also consults neuroscience to investigate why play is fun. And of course there are pleasurable neurochemical changes experienced during play which might at first seem to explain the fun in play. But we all recognize that there has to be something going on inside, there has to be an internal mechanics of some kind generating these affects; this has always been obvious but nevertheless good to know the nuts-and-bolts of the feel good states. However this still doesn’t address the question, why are these neurochemicals affiliated with play so that play feels good? What’s the point in playing? Neurochemicals may be the mechanics but they do not suffice as a reason.
Toward the Why of play, the experts talk about the evolutionary advantages to play, specifically that it builds up cognitive and social capacities for solving the problems of adult life. As Marc Bekoff writes:

“Based on an extensive review of available literature, my colleagues Marek Spinka, Ruth Newberry, and I proposed that play functions to increase the versatility of movements and the ability to recover from sudden shocks such as the loss of balance and falling over, and to enhance the ability of animals to cope emotionally with unexpected stressful situations. To obtain this “training for the unexpected” we suggested that animals actively seek and create unexpected situations in play and actively put themselves into disadvantageous positions and situations.”

Yes play increases cognitive development and emotional resiliency but this can’t be a complete explanation. For one thing, dogs play more than any other species, even as aged adults, and yet they are hardly the most cognitively developed species. Why would so much energy be invested in an activity that has a hard cognitive ceiling beyond which the dog is not going to be able to go? Being playful certainly speaks to a high quotient for adaptability, however the dynamic of adaptability is not likely a cognitive capacity. Secondly, were this to provide a complete explanation there wouldn’t be any need for a catchall category. Thirdly, because emotion is preverbal, contextual analysis would need to avoid human thoughts to explain a play bow, as when it postulates in the mind of the bower: “I am inviting you to play with me, my intentions are playful and so you can relax about my actions even if they appear aggressive.” Human words couldn’t possibly articulate what’s going on inside the dog’s mind however that’s exactly what contextual analysis must always resort to.
Finally, the contextual approach to play, and the fact that we also must weave neurochemicals into our understanding of play since they are part of the mechanical means of implementation, ends up conflicting with the role neurochemistry is said to play in social dominance systems. If in play animals seek to place themselves into “disadvantageous positions and situations,” in other words they are seeking out the bad emotional affects affiliated with unpleasant neurochemicals, why is this same individual said to avoid at all costs these same neurochemicals when it comes to fitting in socially. In discussions of social hierarchies we are told that animals strive to avoid the bad neurochemicals at all costs by seeking at all times to stay in the feel good zone by acquiring social status and/or control over access to resources. The loss of status means less food, less reproductive success, more bad neurochemically charged emotional affects. So if the drive for status revolves around attaining good emotional affects, how could an individual be driven to seek out negative emotional affects in contravention to that which is said to organize social structure? It’s an abrupt U-Turn in logic, sheer intellectual expediency in order to deal with the problem at hand irrespective of how it contravenes what’s going on in another domain of behavior. The neurochemical logic of play contradicts the neurochemical logic of social life. One rationale is being stacked on and beside others and the internal contradictions between them aren’t being noted.
Bekoff is however pointing to some elements of a model; specifically; “versatility of movements”— and — “recover from sudden shocks such as the loss of balance.” I want to point out here the immutable linkage between balance and movement, an individual can’t be versatile in movement without the capacity to maintain balance. Balance and movement are inseparable, they are the most basic, autonomic level of responses relative to the most basic problems of movement such as dealing with resistance and being acted upon by outside forces. Balance and movement will prove promising seeds of a full blown model when seen through the lens of the immediate-moment.
But to build this model we first have to cast neurochemicals in their proper role as mere mechanics, rather than as source, and then this also means not turning to context to accord meaning (which then necessitates the injection of human thoughts which routes us recursively back to intentional states). I suspect that when in a “disadvantageous position” the so called negative neurochemicals are experienced as pleasurable. This isn’t due to context but due to a principle of conductivity. Anything that’s functional to moving well is pleasurable, and what we perceive of as a “disadvantaged” position will prove to be a part of the experience of conductivity as well. To jump a bit ahead, what we call disadvantaged is a complementary phase of a locomotive wave with one interactant in its movement, manner and deportment mirroring the counterbalancing interactant in its particular phase of movement. The interactant in the so-called “disadvantaged” position, is in reality absorbing the “emotional momentum” of the other interactant. I will concentrate on this in greater detail in a subsequent post on the play bow.
Whenever an animal is stimulated for any reason, be it due to a shift in external conditions or internal state of being, it wants to move. The universal motive underlying all behavior is the urge for movement.

And even when an animal doesn’t feel safe enough to move, nevertheless it still wants to move. Movement and emotion are synonymous. And when things are moving well, one feels good.
Thought experiment; in the dead of winter you’re heading to the airport to jet away to a tropical resort. (Sounds pretty good to a New Englander about now) You’ve allowed for plenty of time and as you hit the highway there’s nothing but open road ahead. Neurochemical status? Great. But halfway there as you merge onto the next interstate you come bumper-to-bumper with a river of red lights stretching endlessly to the far horizon. Mired in an interminable crawl, the allotted window of time begins to close. Neurochemical status now? Not so great. So which comes first, which is instrumental, neurochemicals or the feeling of movement? Which is more explicative: context or conductivity?
Being able to move as fast and as efficiently as possible toward something one wants, or as fast and as efficiently as possible away from something one fears, is the optimal course of action in any given situation. Therefore the mechanics of moving well, a principle of conductivity wherein internal energies are smoothly and efficiently transmitted to the surroundings, be this covering physical ground, manipulating objects or interacting with other sentient beings, serves as an internal metric of well-being. This is even true for the highly developed human intellect. Such expressions as: “I feel things aren’t moving fast enough” —- “I feel that things are in motion.” —— “I feel in the flow.”—— are intuitive recognitions that the bodily mechanics of smooth motion is the metric to which the mind resonates, it is mapped onto intellectual pursuits that don’t even engage the physical body. Even then the physical mechanics of movement serves as a template by which to gage higher forms of mental activity, and this is also why body language is intrinsic to verbal discourse.
The contextual mode of analysis pays lip service to the notion of energy as when Abrantes argues that dominance and submission evolved because it is more efficient to ritualize the resolution of disputes over resources this way rather than waste energy in countless physical skirmishes and/or fights. But this analysis fails to ask the obvious, what does being efficient FEEL like?
The mechanics of smooth, efficient movement and the capacities that extend from there, i.e. the projection, absorption and leveraging of force, is defined by an animal’s anatomy and this evolves according to its species-specific locomotive rhythm (see p.86 of “Design In Nature” by Adrian Bejan). The locomotive rhythm is the optimal resolution of the resistances an organism encounters as it moves. This optimal rhythm, a wave action, determines the size and anatomical arrangement of bones, muscles, and organs because these objects must have a weight, shape, size and internal placement that conforms to the locomotive rhythm as a prime “design” criteria. Additionally the locomotive rhythm is the underpinning of an animal’s sense of emotional well being since moving fast and efficiently toward what one desires, or away from what one fears, is the optimal course of action in any given situation. Emotion and motion are inextricably linked by way of the locomotive rhythm. Transmitting internal energies effectively and efficiently so as to move, manipulate objects or deal with other sentient beings, is what feels good.
The locomotive rhythm is a wave of motion generated by sequential contractions of large muscle groups, the propulsive power of the hindquarters surging through to the forequarters and then transmitted to the neck and jaws———Throughput——this wave is a throughput of force mirrored by the rhythmic mechanics of breathing. This synchronized pulse of anatomical and muscular action creates a wave that the body then rides, literally. This is the physical basis for an emotional sense of movement. In other words, being efficient and socially adaptive FEELS like a wave of motion and is the standard against which all experiences are assayed as a function of their conductivity. The locomotive rhythm is at the heart of emotional experience, a template against which everything that reaches the animal mind is measured. (To be explored later, the mental process of objectification, the manner by which data is construed by the mind to take shape as a form, will also prove to be a function of the locomotive rhythm.)

“Waves are said to be an energy transport phenomenon. As a disturbance moves through a medium from one particle to its adjacent particle, energy is being transported from one end of the medium to the other.”

The locomotive wave is composed of two phases, the projection phase when force is projected ahead of the body, and the collecting phase when the body gathers itself over this forward point to which its physical momentum has committed the body to reach. Once projected forward, collecting has to follow or the rhythm collapses in a heap.

Both phases are characterized with all four feet off the ground, the body suspended in mid-air, literally taking flight for a beat of the heart. These two phases weld two separate points of Space together into the rhythm of the heart, a beat of Time, one wave. Since the locomotive rhythm is synonymous with emotion, therefore emotion is experienced as a wave of motion moving through the body in concordance with the act of running, the mechanics of breathing, the beats of the heart. If an animal can run toward what it wants, and if it can run away from what it fears, then it is at an optimal state of well being given the particular conductivity of a given situation.
Meanwhile, the current consensus on animal cognition focuses on states of intention and this is what leads it to a total concentration on neurology and neurochemistry, human rationales for survival and replication, and thereby completely misses how the body and its highly evolved anatomy is the true metric of experience and the basis for how the animal mind constructs its view of reality and adapts to the forces that act on it, and with which it must generate in order to act on its surroundings in a coherent manner.
What would prove to be a better strategy for gaging one’s survival or reproductive chances, trying to divine the intentional states of others, or the capacity to sense the capacities of others? We should sleep better at night knowing that our military prepares contingency plans not based on what they think the intentions of other military powers might be, but on what they believe about their capacities. The capacity to project force begets opportunities and finding oneself in an opportune position that one has the capacity to exploit can change an intention in an instant. Therefore it’s not logical that a dog would read body language such as play bows in terms of intentional states because they are so mercurial. Animals couldn’t possibly have evolved to care much about their own intentions or by trying to divine the intentions of others. It only cares about capacity. A gazelle wouldn’t live long if it wandered close to a resting cheetah relying on its reading of its intentions in that situation. All an animal need care about is how fast, how far and with how much force another being can project force its way. This value becomes embedded in its individual memory and ultimately within its genetic memory. If one walks through the wild no animals will venture close because of the human capacity to project force, whatever intentions one may hold are irrelevant even though we’d all delight in a lovely songbird alighting on our finger.
Note that the flight distances of animals relative to human beings have changed in response to the capacity of humans to project force via the evolution of human weaponry. When I used to hunt deer with my father in Maine, on our way into camp on the Sunday before hunting season we’d see deer browsing in the vast blueberry fields that adjoined the camp road before it disappeared into the forest. That sight always stirred me for the prospects of the hunt to come. But then Monday morning when hunting season began, a deer was never to be seen in the open during the day again. Two solid weeks of cruising the woods rarely produced a sighting of a deer, only their sign. The deer had adapted to our seasonal capacity to project force via a high powered rifle. Another experiment I once conducted when I was a teenager was to try to carry a rifle near a “murder” of crows who always gathered around the compost pile my father had behind the barn. When I went to dump manure from the stalls with the inevitable scraps of hay seeds, grain as well as stuff from my mothers’ kitchen, the crows would noisily clammer and hawk around the trees overhead. But when I carried a rifle in my free hand, and even when I later tucked it out of sight under my coat, they would be long gone as soon as I made my approach. That was my introduction to how sensitive the animal mind is to another’s capacity to project force.
Were one tasked to build a robot, the first order of business would be imbuing it with the capacity to project force, to absorb force, and if one were really good at building a robot, to couple its force with an amplifying force so that it could project, absorb and leverage even more force. Every posture, facial expression, and physical action, as well as internal biochemistry, is the language of an individual’s capacity to project, leverage, absorb and couple to force.
Behavior is a transfer of force, and in the case of play, a refined coupling of force. The FORCE that a reinFORCEMENT exerts on behavior, is due to the degree of FORCE that a particular behavior transfers. The mechanics of this transfer is a wave action. Play, among many other kinds of behavior, finds its reinforcement value because it represents an amplification of force. The evolutionary advantage? This increases the capacity to project, absorb and leverage even more force.
It is inarguable that evolution proceeds according to capacity because the movement of physical forces is the very basis of the natural environment to which an animal must adapt. Therefore projecting, absorbing and leveraging force in a conductive medium feels good because this is how nature itself evolves. This is why play is fun. Neurochemistry follows.

In the next article on the play bow we will consider how if the bow isn’t an invitation that can be articulated by way of human thoughts, then how does the bow posture draw another dog in? And for what reason is the play bower manifesting the display. In other words, why does it function like an invitation?

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]]>My reading of animal behavior has led me to understand the principle of emotional conductivity as the connective glue of animal consciousness, and hence, a new way of understanding what constitutes information in the animal mind. Information equals consciousness converting environmental inputs into emotional, temperamental values. Since I can see the same primal code at work in all the animals I’ve known, I’ve presumed that there is a network consciousness encompassing all of life and all of life as constituting the domain of energy. This is consistent with Darwin’s conviction that “we are all netted.” This is what has particularly captivated me with the Constructal Law (“Design In Nature” by Adrian Bejan) which demonstrates that objects of resistance are incorporated into an underlying current as an improvement of a configuration. Since viruses directly interface with the DNA of cells, it occurred to me that they are also part of the network consciousness. We are not at war with viruses, they like bacteria, are part of a dynamic auto-tuning mechanism. (BTW it is still believed in some quarters that testosterone is an anti-social influence as well. That’s how far behind the mainstream science on dogs is behind this latest kind of research. My point is we don’t have to wait for the studies to be done, they’re already being performed in the nature of the dogs we live and work with.) My hunch is that viruses tweak the gene code so that the genome is informed about environmental exigencies. I believe the following article confirms this view of information as the result of a network consciousness.

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]]>One of the ideas that places my way of looking at nature farthest from the mainstream is my belief that there isn’t a competition between animals and that therefore this can’t be THE driving force of evolution. There is indeed pressure when forces collide, and one will “prevail” to be sure, and there is friction between animals, but underlying this is a principle of conductivity that will ultimately resolve the conflicts as an improvement to the flow of the system at large. My argument is that unless we understand this distinction we will reflexively accord a psychological motive to a behavior and thereby miss the underlying flow principle around which any given behavior is actually configuring. I am currently working on an ebook applying my understanding of Constructal Law to the nature of the canine mind and below is a draft of the introduction. I want to emphasize that this is my understanding of Constructal Law and errors in its application are mine alone as well. Challenges are welcome.

INTRODUCTION

The body evolved to move from Point A to Point B. And while the competitive pressures of other organisms or the lethal hazards of the environment may be pressing concerns in the evolution of an organism, the problem of locomotion is more fundamental, far more fundamental, it is the central “design” criteria. Furthermore, running as fast as possible toward something one wants, or as fast as possible away from something one fears, is the prime means of dealing with competitive pressures and environmental hazards and so even these demands would merely reinforce locomotion’s primacy in evolution.

Locomotion evolves in response to gravity, laws of motion, electromagnetism and especially, thermodynamics, specifically the Constructal Law. Logically speaking therefore these must be the chief selective forces that shape an organism’s evolutionary trajectory.

While avoiding objects of resistance is important to efficient locomotion, it’s not enough to just avoid things. Organisms must also affect objects, and do so coherently. Because systems evolve by improving access to flow, coherence means importing objects of resistance (O-R) into the configuration as an improvement to said flow. The capacity to affect objects coherently also evolves in response to gravity, laws of motion, electromagnetism and especially, thermodynamics.

The movement of mass and the manipulation of objects shape the genes of an organism. Competitive advantages over other organisms are not yet (if at all) relevant.

The third problem before survival and reproductive strategies can be said to enter the formula, is persistence. The capacity to move from Point A to Point B and to affect objects coherently over the long term invokes a capacity to persist. This capacity also evolves in response to gravity, laws of motion, electromagnetism and thermodynamics.

Thermodynamics is especially relevant because of the Constructal law which speaks directly to the nature of persistence. The Constructal law states:

“For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to survive) its configuration must evolve (morph) in time in such a way that it provides easier flow access.”

Adrian Bejan, author of “Design In Nature” and discoverer of the Constructal Law

The Constructal law follows from Bejan’s observation that the preexisting laws of Thermodynamics are incomplete. Thermodynamics up until the Constructal law articulated that energy is always conserved and that energy always moves from warm to cool, but it failed to specify the manner by which things move from warm to cool, from high to low, from up to down. Such movement is not amorphous or random, rather it follows a predictable structure observable in the design of all things, inanimate as well as animate. This structure is the template on which all design evolves. Structure is always a hierarchy of branching channels that vascularizes a field so as to improve the access for the current that animates the structure. Otherwise the design cannot persist. It must always be improving.

What does it mean to improve? In addition to spreading its reach through vascularization, it also means that objects of resistance which impede the flow, are incorporated into the configuration that facilitates the flow. For example a flash flood scours a creek bed. Obstacles of resistance; soil, rocks, trees, etc., are deposited farther downstream or embedded in the new walls of the deepened waterway. The design has improved because it can conduct more water and is thereby more likely to persist.

If an animal evolves to move faster and farther with the least expenditure of energy, and to manipulate objects coherently so as to improve the configuration through which it is sustained, at some point it becomes fit and can compete in the survival and reproductive derby relative to other organisms. Of course if competition is a word we must use, this means that we are seeing any given animal as a self-contained entity and agency of evolution without a fundamental connection to the prime channel which animates nature in general. But even if this were to ultimately emerge to be the case, until that advanced point in its evolution, this capacity to improve will not be driven by competitive pressures because the improvement of flow is already inherent in the nature of any system, from the inanimate configurations of natural flow systems that morph toward optimal flow, to the animate domain of living organisms that must do work to live. Their configurations will always be improving as this is the nature of flow, a principle of physics.

One might say in rebuttal that there are internal competing demands within any organism and this inner struggle gives rise to the optimal flow configuration of its body. However the conflict will always be resolved by a principle of conductivity, like the rules of a game already in effect before two teams ever take the field. The resolution can only happen in conformance with a principle of conductivity. One side doesn’t prevail over another and thereby set a new and arbitrary standard for excellence. The results of the “competition” are a foregone conclusion, improvement of the flow by virtue of a principle of conductivity. The rules evolve and the game changes over time in accord to this principle and without regard to the individual psyche’s. Internally and externally when forces collides the rules of resolution are the laws of gravity, electromagnetism, motion and most especially thermodynamics. I believe that it would be more accurate to simply call such a state pressure because the word competitive is freighted with a human psychology which will ultimately be inscribed as a principle of the animal mind. This is why we see this wherever we see treatments of animal behavior. Yes human beings can be competitive and no nature isn’t a pacific wonderland, but nevertheless the term compete in its larger meaning requires a capacity to compare one moment in time with another, and/or one point of view with another. Humans ask such things “Am I better than You, and what will happen to me if I’m not, or am.” I don’t feel animals can compete in this sense of the word.

Before we consider the term competition we must first exhaust the capacity to explain complex behavior by way of the laws of nature. Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian factors are not yet in play as to how organisms evolve to move and affect objects. It is in the evolutionary interest for any organism to evolve the most efficient means of locomotion independent of the need to get away from predators or chase down prey. It does not require competitive pressure to effect this evolution because until the system flows efficiently it will be burdened with excess “heat” and resolving this is an innate driving force irregardless of extrinsic factors. The laws of nature are the selective criteria because there is only one way to move the body and manipulate objects effectively. Any genes that don’t encode for effective movement and manipulation are of no consequence. A competition between organisms will not improve the manner and method of movement or manipulation. It’s an innate impulse of natural systems to move and manipulate more and more mass with less and less energy. This is a feature of nature itself.

Canine body language revolves around the same question that drives much social research, what is the nature of impulse control?

I propose that a primal impulse can only be held in check by an impulse of equal primacy. Otherwise an individual will be in a profound state of conflict and will inevitably either succumb to temptation or develop a negative coping alternative. Furthermore, what animates and informs a dog’s articulation of its body, is simultaneously the predicate of impulse control.

Currently however, impulse control is attributed by the mainstream to higher aspects of consciousness rather than lower. But this is unlikely because the inevitable conflict of a primal impulse that hasn’t been resolved will still be active and working to erode the capacity for self restraint. If an inappropriate impulse is to be held back in deference to a later benefit, it can only be checked by an impulse equally base, otherwise control over a basic impulse will fail.

Impulse control is also posited as a diminishable resource, like an emotional reserve that is drained when taxed.

I believe that impulse control quickly diminishes when a base impulse is being held in check by a higher cognitive faculty. But when a base impulse that restrains another base impulse, is reinforced by a positive experience and to the degree that a permanent imprint takes hold, then in this way impulse control can be seen as an almost limitless resource. Certainly what pro-social dogs exhibit given what they must endure, strangers in the home, vets poking and probing, groomers trimming and snipping, are examples of this possibility. In other words, when the controlling agency is extrinsic, impulse control diminishes with fatigue. But when control is intrinsic, it is augmented by experience and fatigue does not erode it.

{A further note on the emotional stamina of impulse control. Because an animal experiences the overcoming of resistance as the resolution of a previous stress memory, and because the animal mind is configured as an emotional stress “sponge” so that conscious experience is tantamount to the acquisition of more and more stress, this is a further reason why impulse control can be an almost limitless resource.}

What follows below is an exercise in logic on the nature of impulse control that is based on the assumption of behavior as a function of attraction, in contrast to the current assumption that behavior is a function of intention. The latter assumption leads one to focus on higher cognitive functions as the source of the higher social virtues such as impulse control. This is incongruent firstly because we see such a high degree of social organization and reliable degree of self-less devotion to a caste-specific function in the lower phyla of life such as insects rather than suddenly arising in the most advanced species.

In either system of analysis, Attraction versus Intention, one is making an assumption. There is no way around this. However the benefit of the former is that one is aware of making an assumption, whereas in the latter one is not since the intention seems self-evident and flaws in the logic that follows from this assumption are never addressed because they are never even apprehended. Therefore the Intention line of analysis doesn’t have the benefit of testing both avenues of inquiry. And since the Intention assumption (and the accompanying reflex to personify) is the default setting of the human mind, one should be suspicious of taking that path exclusively. Whereas the benefit of the former is that it already takes in the ramifications of the latter since intention-seeing is already a habit of the human mind.

My treatment below is a speculation about what is going on inside a dog’s body and mind that enables impulse control based on the assumption of behavior as a function of attraction. What follows below I believe squares up far better with the latest scientific evidence on behavior than does the logic that follows from the intention assumption. This will also provide a basis for more fully understanding canine body language because first and foremost, any and all behavior, either between an animal and its environment or between an animal and another animal, represents a transfer of force. Body language is an economy based on the exchange of this force. The transfer of emotional force follows the exact same physics as the transfer of physical force. The following treatment unites these two domains, the language of the animal mind as expressed via the mechanics of the body.

Consider the following interview with Frans De Waal, the worlds foremost primatologist.

Question: How do you define empathy?

Frans De Waal: “The core of empathy is being in tune with others both emotionally and motorically. These two are less separate than one might think. Seeing a smiling face makes us smile. Seeing someone sad and frowning makes us frown. These motor responses feed into our emotions, so that imitation and empathy are in reality two sides of the same coin.”

From my reading of animal behavior I couldn’t agree more. In fact we could go even deeper into the parallel between the dynamics of emotion and the mechanics of motion in order to understand the evolution of impulse control, undoubtedly integral to empathy as well as all social virtues.

My argument is that the only possible source of such a counterbalancing primal impulse would be as the equal and opposite COMPLEMENT to the impulse that needs to be countermanded. By equal I mean it must be base, it couldn’t be of a higher cognitive function because thoughts aren’t effective in restraining primal impulses without inciting conflict, and neither does the cognitive argument provide a logical path for the evolution of impulse control and deferred gratification. For example we find that dogs are better than apes at self-restraint (dogs will herd sheep through Prey Drive as opposed to killing sheep through Prey Instinct, not to mention their ability to live freely among us), and truth be told when properly raised are far more reliable in regards to self control than humans. Self-restraint and the capacity to modify primal impulses must be primal rather than advanced.

However by opposite, impulse control wouldn’t mean doing nothing or going in the opposite direction, but rather it remains equal in that it is integral to the act of movement, and given that moving toward something is at the root of any behavior that needs to be held in check. It must be an impulse equally vital to motion as is the impulse that is to be restrained. In other words, holding back would still feel like getting somewhere (and thus the basis of a capacity to sense a potential gratification by deferring from the immediate impulse to move). So if the impulse to move is at the root of an action or sequence of actions that needs to be countered, then there would have to be an equal and opposite impulse integral to the act of movement that can be (1) isolated from the mechanics of movement and then (2) highlighted so as to neutralize the impulse to move. Only this would effect impulse control without inducing a state of conflict.

There is only one possible candidate that is composed of two primal impulses in a complementary juxtaposition and with both components being integral to the act of going as fast as possible toward something one wants, or as fast as possible away from something one fears. This is the locomotive rhythm as detailed in “Design In Nature” by Adrian Bejan, the discoverer of the Constructal law, a principle of thermodynamics in conformance to which every aspect of an organism’s physiology has evolved, from the size of an organ to its placement within the body and therefore I would argue, the behavior an animal is capable of generating. The locomotive rhythm is the most efficient use of energy in order to propel the body as fast as possible with the least amount of effort.

Because running as fast as possible toward something one wants, or as fast as possible away from something one fears, would be a physical metric of efficient action, an internal measure which registers within the animal mind on its most primordial level of organization that the individual is doing the best it can in whatever situation it may find itself in, this would therefore have evolved to constitute the emotional state of well-being even when the animal isn’t actually moving. It serves as a standard against which the emotional processing of stimuli and context is contrasted in order to arrive at a value. In other words, the mind processes emotion the same way the body processes motion. The locomotive rhythm writes the language of the body.

The locomotive rhythm is composed of two complementary and equal phases: (1) Projection, extending the legs out fully into a maximum stride and (2) Collection, gathering the legs back under the torso in preparation for the next stride.

In locomotion the “collecting” phase (gathering force back into the body) is as vital as the “projecting” phase, (throwing force from the body) because if both phases aren’t perfectly matched then an individual will either pancake on the ground or fall flat on its face.

However the physical act of putting one paw in front of another is preceded by an emotional dynamic that is likewise predicated on the locomotive rhythm. First and foremost a stimulus represents an excitation of the organism so that to some extent it has been knocked out of a preexisting state of emotional equilibrium. In response the animal feels compelled to move, i.e. it has been “accelerated” and its subsequent behaviors are calibrated to return the emotional system to equilibrium and this means moving to the extent that this exhausts the “force” of acceleration. A return to equilibrium by exhausting the acceleration requires that there be a transfer of force, whether we’re talking about an individual moving from point A to point B or individual A interacting with individual B. Interacting with the environment or with other individuals requires a transfer of force. So before a physical act can occur the individual must gage if the environment or the other being is capable of absorbing said force. Emotion is a modeling program that uses the past to predict the future. It answers the question that precedes any action: “What will I feel forward in Time as I move my body forward in Space?” To answer this question, the emotional center-of-gravity (the physical center-of-gravity plus all physical memories of movement and emotional experience) is projected forward so that the dog from an autonomic survey of its past can project a feeling of its body forward in space in order to collect information as to what it is likely to experience when it arrives at the place or object it wants to get to. In short there is an emotional momentum, an emotional projection of force, that precedes any action, a physical projection of force.

The capacity for emotional projection is acquired during the imprinting period of early life when the individual is learning to move its body in the pursuit of what it wants or away from what it fears. All objects and places attain their emotional relevance, and are thereafter categorized through experience, as to whether or not they can absorb and/or conduct the individual’s emotional momentum. In other words, the process of objectification, the dynamic by which the mind picks out elements of the surroundings and construes them as objects, is likewise a function of the locomotive rhythm. Objects are construed in the mind and acquire their relevance in terms of their resistance to the locomotive rhythm. On one level this is so obvious as to not seem worth mentioning since the first order of movement is to not run into things that don’t yield. But it also elaborates to the highest social levels so that emotional experience in interactions with other living beings is also a function of the locomotive rhythm.

In the beginning of the imprinting process emotional projection extends to just the first few steps forward. But as locomotion is mastered emotional projection quickly extends all the way to an object of attraction, even one that is moving so that an intercept point can be factored in, and to the far horizon if that’s where the animal aims to go. As the complete sequence of footfalls to go from point A to point Z as quickly and efficiently as possible becomes computed, emotional projection has already grafted the locomotive rhythm onto an object of attraction and this is reflected in just how fast an animal proceeds toward it.

Because the locomotive rhythm is the metric of well-being and right action, the standard against which stimuli are rated, objects are apprehended and construed on the most basic level of the animal mind as a function of resistance to emotional momentum. Thus when “painted” by the e-cog in the projection process, a feeling returns (is collected) as to whether or not the object in question can absorb and/or conduct the individual’s emotional momentum. More simply put, emotional projection addresses the question, can said object be accelerated and how much force will be required to do so?

We can clearly see with puppies for example that their native impulse is to set things in motion. The world is to be accelerated. The question, as it were, puppies are constantly asking is; Can I move this object?—–and the first step to setting a thing in motion is to ask: Can I fit this into my mouth? If something can fit in the mouth, it can be carried and thus made to conform to the locomotive rhythm. The ingestive impulse is at the root of the locomotive rhythm metric of well-being because things that fit in the mouth are the easiest things to move and therefore are the most conductive. And if the size–or the history–of the object is such that it can absorb but not conduct enough emotional momentum, then the impulse becomes to rip it apart. For example, a predator chases a running prey. The prey is absorbing and conducting the predator’s emotional momentum. The prey is then caught and torn apart. It is still absorbing, but not conducting. In another context this dual function of emotional projection can be seen as well. For example, perhaps you’ve been smelled by a dog who wags its tail while it’s checking out your pant cuffs–Absorb emotional projection?—-> Yes; but then it looks up at your eyes and explodes with a bark in your face–Conduct emotional momentum?—-> NO.

At the other end of the spectrum some things are small but do not absorb, such as things made of metal and so therefore they don’t get to the conductive phase. But in any eventuality all interactions with either inanimate objects or living beings are experienced and categorized in terms of this metric, the locomotive rhythm as the basis of well-being and the subsequent questions, can this object be accelerated and how much force will that take.

When an interaction doesn’t go well the physical sensations of crashing, actual physical memories of motion gone awry, of falling and/or running into things (as far as emotional momentum is concerned these are identical experiences) are applied to that object or living being. This is why even our sophisticated brains categorize people that we interact with as being either too pushy or not receptive to our push, or just right if the interaction “flows” with a desired back and forth exchange of emotion (i.e. “ping/pong”). The back and forth exchange of momenta reacquires the locomotive rhythm for both individuals, but now at a more refined and higher level expression. (We can see that a systems logic is embedded in the very construct of emotion so that objects come into mind by way of their resistance to flow of emotion, and thus for the individual to reacquire its sense of locomotive rhythm, it feels compelled to accelerate said object. If it can’t ingest it because it proves to have a mind of its own and will resist, then it will seek to align and synchronize with its movements so as to reacquire its locomotive rhythm. This then means that it must act in a way that feels conductive to the other. Therefore there is an innate impulse toward sociability, to giving the other individual a good experience in order to render one for oneself. Collectivized social behavior is a function of the locomotive rhythm because the mind itself is configured around this internal metric of well-being.)

I feel qualified to make such assertions given my experience training protection and police dogs because this work affords one a special vantage point from which to discern the mechanics by which dogs interact, the body language of play and prey-making and most importantly, fighting to overcome resistance. Protection training is based on the phenomenon of emotional projection, which links movement with the ingestive urge. The motor system and the locomotive rhythm as an internal metric of well-being that affects the viscera and heart through “vagal tone” is the most logical avenue for the evolution of impulse control and the capacity for deferred gratification, as opposed to the current consensus that proposes the advent of a high cognitive capacity such as the ability to entertain a Theory of Mind and intellectually sample the perspectives of others so as to calculate one’s prospects over Time.

Additionally the mistake modern behaviorism is making is to assume that social behavior (as well as complex problem solving in animals) is complex. In reality, and again from my reading of animal behavior, social behavior while complex in the sense that many moving parts are forming a “multi-celled organism;” is actually the reduction of a complex situation in the minds of its constituents back down to a simple motive, i.e. reacquiring the locomotive rhythm, the individual’s optimal manner of moving effectively and efficiently so that this can be mapped onto complex situations and interactions with other beings.

Impulse control derives from the capacity to map something simple:

Pressure (-) and a Release-from-Pressure ( )

onto something complicated and otherwise confusing. These two values impart a sense of flow in the animal mind because all behavior, most especially interactions with other living beings, are at bedrock a transfer of force and before force can move, a direction for movement must first be determined. Aspects of the environment are categorized according to these two criteria, those things that increase sensations of pressure versus those things that decrease sensations of pressure. In this way Temperament converts an environmental value (high versus low, hard versus soft, near versus far, hot versus cold, fast versus slow) into a Temperamental value (predator and prey); which is necessary to being able to map the locomotive rhythm onto an object of attraction.

(eyes) Predator (-) ———————–> (+) Prey (body)

Perceiving these two temperamental values has to occur if an animal is going to be able to respond coherently to a stimulus or situation.

However this is still just a binary

GO ——> (+)

or

NO GO ——–> (-)

on/off switch, a simple instinct, and furthermore it doesn’t allow for a high degree of impulse control because NO GO is a loading experience that results in an increase of pressure which obviates the perception of a future benefit available by an act of deferral. It is not the perception of potential energy and therefore it doesn’t change for the better an individual’s overload threshold. (In fact the individual becomes more and more addicted to that overload set point because going past it and overloading leads to some short term relief.)

Nevertheless the important ramification of this template is that once the temperamental poles are identified so that there’s a direction for flow, it next allows the individual’s mind to discern, magnify and fixate upon…..

the threshold value …… / …….

between the two emotional poles so that a far more complex view of an object becomes available. With the threshold discerned, the two complementary phases of the locomotive rhythm, projection and collection, can be de-coupled from the autonomic process of movement and selectively highlighted.

(-) ————- / ————> (+)

Projection of a threshold value onto a complex stimulus allows an instinct to be deconstructed and then reapplied in a novel way (through the power of physical memories coming forward in the moment) that will prove adaptive to the circumstances at hand when otherwise the entire reflexive sequence could have proven maladaptive in that it might have provoked the individual to either withdraw from some benefit that could be available, or incited to go forward when imprudent to do so. {That which reduces pressure in an animals’ Temperament is a “preyful aspect” (+) }

The first instance in the animal mind of decoupling collection from projection in the locomotive rhythm and focusing on the threshold value happens in terms of interacting with the environment as for example when encountering a break in the terrain, this is an objectification of the threshold value, an interruption of the flow; the need to traverse a divide or surmount an obstacle.

(-) / ( )

On one side of the threshold is pressure, on the other side release from pressure.

An environmental threshold of a change in terrain naturally elicits the urge to pause and shift the body weight onto the rear haunches (collection) in order to gather the force required to launch across (projection). The strength of the urge to hold back, to collect and wait, is directly proportional to the hunger for what’s on the other side of the divide. This kind of environmental interrupt would be the most primordial instance in the mind of an animal wherein it selectively directs its internal focus on one phase of the locomotive rhythm independent of the other, and at the same time associating the impulse to hold back with the flow of moving forward. The urge to hold oneself in check and gather muscle tension being equal to the appetite for flow. The animal mind is organized to coherently address such interruptions to its locomotive rhythm when encountered in the environment and likewise this same organization is applied in interactions with living beings, if the primordial thermodynamic values can be discerned.

Evolutionarily, the first application of a threshold value to a living being so that thermodynamics could inform the participants, would occur in the oldest relationship that first evolved between living beings, the prey/predator dynamic. The threshold between the two prime emotional traits (Predator/Prey) is transcribed into a Temperamental value through the prey making urge. This is true of all species of animals whether they are predator or prey since the prey/predator dynamic is simply a higher elaboration of the thermodynamics of emotion, i.e. energy moving from high to low pressure. (And this is why deer when they feel safe play just like dogs because their emotion flows through the prey/predator dynamic in prey species just as it does in predator species.) All animals, birds and fish seek to move as fast as possible toward what they want, or as fast as possible away from what they fear as an innate internal metric of well-being. The zone of highest pressure constitutes the predatory aspect, the zone of lowest pressure constitutes the preyful aspect. The former projects and is the source of force, the latter absorbs and is the receiver of force. In the minds of animals all objects of attraction represent a reduction of pressure and perceptually contain the kernel of a preyful aspect. This template is true of animals, birds and fish and then evolves into the protocol by which an animal can feel how to interact coherently with any other living being under any and all contexts and throughout the course of any kind of relationship; from intercepting and bringing a prey animal to ground, or in the case of a prey animal, how to avoid being intercepted and brought to ground, as well as navigating social interactions with peers. Nature didn’t evolve different operating systems for different species of animals any more than computers evolved to have different basic operating systems for different kinds of computing.

The capacity to hold back the compulsion to go forward did not evolve out of higher mental processes, it emerged from the physical capacities required to move the body through the environment, which then elaborated to the necessary things individuals must do to secure food or avoid becoming food, and then finally to live among their own kind. This interpretation of evolution is consistent with Darwinian logic, specifically the notion of evolutionary continuity and conservation.

When this threshold is projected onto a complex Object-of-Resistance (such as another dog), the subject dog assigns this threshold value to the shoulder tension in the object dog because the forequarters are the physical assembly that gives an animal the capacity to remain upright and retain their ability to keep moving forward when being acted upon by an external force.

A complex being, according to the way Temperament translates environmental values, (high pressure, low pressure, breaks in terrain) into emotional values (Predator, Prey, Resistance) could be represented as below ……

[ (-) ————- R ———–> (+) ]

The head region of the O-R represents High pressure, i.e. source of force (-), the hind end of an O-R represents release from pressure (+). The capacity of an object animal to resist being “accelerated” is perceived by the subject as a threshold value. The threshold, the precipice state between making or not making contact (revealed by shoulder tension) is like a valve and so the question becomes is it open (relaxed) or is it closed (tight). This brings us from the realm of instinct into the domain of feelings and Drive because with the threshold magnified, a range of responses along a gradient becomes available.

If Balance is stronger than Hunger then perception of resistance is magnified:

[ (-)——————–R —> (+) ]

and the individual seeks to manage sensations of pressure because it’s focus in on the tension it’s trying to manage. Because the object’s “valve” is closed, strong upward thrust in shoulder region, the body language of the subject is tentative, like walking on egg shells. The subject is responding to the object as if the object is a force acting on its body and so it works to keep that pressure manageable. While this is a socially coherent manner of perception in that the subject is holding itself back, it doesn’t get us very far in regards to impulse control because in pressure management strategies, output (action) almost immediately has to equal input (stimulation). The subjects’ shoulder assembly is as tight as the objects and the movements of the object are unsettling because they add even more load. This is the basis of a reactive or hyper-active dog with their capacity to hold back limited by the constant sense of being under pressure from an external force. Because balance is so paramount, configuring the p-cog either under (“submission”) or over (“dominance”) the shoulder tension in the object becomes the motive of the subject once they have become emotionally rooted into the object. Nevertheless because the threshold value is so pronounced and is the pivot point around which the subject is navigating its own movements, it can easily negotiate the emotional terrain and shift into a preferred emotional state, i.e. Hunger being stronger than Balance, this minimizes resistance. Or better put, resistance becomes arousing rather than unsettling.

[ (-) — r ———————-> (+) ]

In this modality resistance is subsumed into hunger because the subject has become emotionally grounded and is now focusing on the positive preyful aspects of the object rather than its predatory aspects. Through emotional projection the subject is already feeling what it will be feeling (thanks to physical memories of its earliest imprint coming to the surface) after it gets past the divide just as if it’s looking past a change in the terrain and projecting into something it really wants. With resistance minimized the capacity to fine tune one’s movements via the threshold value becomes available because the subject is now able to sense that how it moves affects the object in a direct one-to-one correspondence. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. (Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion is how an animal arrives at a sense of its Self, it’s how two integrate into one.) The subject can feel the feedback in the minimized state that it can’t feel in the maximized state. It feels that it is physically connected to the object in that it is acting as an extension of itself, that it controls the object rather than the object being a force acting on it and knocking it off balance, impeding its locomotive rhythm. It feels as if it is about to reacquire its locomotive rhythm because the subject perceives the object as an extension of its own body and is able to learn how to manipulate it, to actually articulate it just as it does with its own legs and body when it wants to move. It begins to feel in control of the object just as a child learning to ride a bike begins to feel in control of the forces acting on the bike as opposed to the pre-learning phases when the child feels as if it is the object of uncontrollable forces that it is barely resisting.

In the hunger mode, the subject engages with a sensual rather than a sensitive orientation. The subject is aroused by the objects’ resistance. Sensuality in response to the threshold is how objects-of-resistance attain new emotional values along that gradient above, in fact, once the predatory aspect is wholly minimized the value can float up and down the scale because the negative is now perceived as granting access to the positive. When hunger is paramount over balance, the collection phase has primacy over the projection phase (for reasons discussed later) and this makes it easy for the subject to hold itself back, just as if it’s adroitly navigating uncertain terrain with confidence in every step. This is because the subject can feel feedback from its own movements as being reflected in the objects’ movements. It has deftness of fine motor movement because it is referencing its physical center-of-gravity rather than trying to manage sensations of pressure in its head. It’s perception is thus progressively drawn to the objects’ center of gravity as opposed to its eyes. This is how emotional bonds form, through a process of integration, an “emotional coupling” between subject and object; an emotional transformation of mapping an increasingly precise point in subliminal awareness in the subject’s body, onto an increasingly precise point being discerned in the other beings’ body. The subliminal internal focal beam on the subjects’ p-cog becomes paired with the objects’ p-cog so that everything the object might do, deepens the subjects feeling of connection, and hence arousal, within his own body. He has attention and access to a sense of his body, and with a depth of pleasure that he otherwise wouldn’t have because it takes an external trigger to activate his sense of his own p-cog and release the physical memories of flow attached to it. Now the tension of the object becomes arousing, categorized as potential energy rather than as a limit on physical movement as is the case when balance is paramount relative to the threshold value. As they interact, smelling, snuffling and licking are the most likely impulses to come up, and the body deportment of the subject is soft rather than pushy leading them into play, and were they free to roam, ultimately to some kind of concerted team action for reasons we’ll discuss as we go on.

Were the object dog to stiffen during the interaction, the subject dog collects and regroups to approach from a different angle or adopt a softer tack as he’s easily deflected or dissuaded given how deep his state of sensuality has become and can innately measure his movements just as if he’s navigating a tricky patch of ground. The negative or predatory aspect of the object is not perceived as a limit but more like a guardrail channeling his actions which little by little can enfold the object into a mutually gratifying dynamic since the object is likewise operating via the locomotive rhythm as a metric of its well being. And if circumstances were to permit, their movements will collectivize into synchronized movements along a common axis. They will form a long term relationship predicated on a common goal (H+) that can absorb and conduct their combined momenta.

The capacity to perceive and then become aroused by the threshold value is especially pronounced in dogs given their high emotional capacity. This evolved due to the phenomenon of Neotony and its linkage to a pronounced sexual/sensuality, which is the ability to hold onto a feeling for a preyful aspect at a high rate of change. In this way resistance to the movement of emotion can be converted back to a feeling of flow. This linkage became highly developed in canines given the wolfs’ evolution as a group hunter and then which the domestication of the dog amplified exponentially given that the hunt was how these two different species integrated, just as it is for a group of wolves.

Sociability is a simple rather than a complex phenomenon. It is not the result of a math module running the odds to produce a complex social structures. It’s the exact opposite, sociability represents a regression back to the prime and universal code of animal conduct that exists far below the level of conscious reasoning. The merging of the outside with the inside through resistance triggering earliest memories of flow, is a REGRESSION back to the prime and universal code of animal conduct rather than an elevation to a higher mental state. If a complex situation can be boiled down to its basic thermodynamic reality, ascertaining a direction of flow, then a coherent interaction can take place. If an individual is able to map the locomotive rhythm onto complex situations and then work the variables of the system as if one is hooked up to a biofeedback device, is the essence of impulse control and the heart of being social and this is a simple emotional process not a mental cogitative act. Resistance regresses the adult mind to its infant state of mind wherein emotional projection and coupling can occur. The subsequent elaboration of a back and forth exchange of emotional momentum between two or more beings that leads to a higher expression of movement, what we recognize as cooperative and social behavior, nonetheless remains consistent with all the principles of thermodynamics, most especially, the Constructal Law. Social is a function of simplicity, not complexity.

When the subliminal focus on the subject’s p-cog is firmly welded to the external apprehension on the object’s p-cog, a matrix of “Pavlovian Equivalencies” acquired during the imprinting phase of infancy, kicks in so that even if the subject is completely rebuffed by the object, being sensually attuned within its body, it will then switch to the next higher modality that arises from this state, an OBJECTIFICATION of the threshold.

Animals need to move when stimulated. Objects of attraction stimulate them, i.e. knock them off balance which then invests them with a degree of “acceleration” which they can only resolve by movement. When stimulated an animal feels compelled to move, and to move toward said object of displacement in order to resolve that emotional force of acceleration. And in order to move an animal configures its body around its physical center-of-gravity and it thereby associates its internal p-cog with objects of attraction. The stronger the hunger for the object, the stronger the fuse between it and the p-cog. The external object and the internal p-cog become synonymous, equivalent. In other words, even the process by which an object comes to take on its form in the mind of an animal is a function of the locomotive rhythm.

Therefore whenever stimulated, an animal’s neurology automatically orients for an object as something it can move toward, and if the locomotive rhythm can be reacquired after making contact then the object becomes integrated into an animal’s sense of its Self. So the ever present need to reacquire the locomotive rhythm, and the Pavlovian equivalency imprinted in an animal’s mind between its physical center-of-gravity and external objects of attraction, combine to inspire a tendency to OBJECTIFY the threshold so that it becomes externally manifest as an object in its own right, a manifestation of the locomotive rhythm, after which it serves as a pivot point or fulcrum, an “emotional midpoint,” around which the interactants can orbit and more readily organize their collective movements. Otherwise until an object as an external manifestation of the midpoint becomes clear, as mentioned and depicted above, the threshold is physically manifested as High Muscle Tension in the forequarters. I call this resistance value “Upward Thrust” ……………..

[(-) — () — (+) ]

………….. i.e. the amount of muscle tension an individual keeps poised in its forequarters so as to resist being knocked off balance and so that it can sustain forward motion. However rigidity in the forequarters countervails the capacity to move forward freely (dogs love to roll on their backs to escape the work of maintaining this muscle tension) and to calmly absorb external forces and capture them for subsequent integration, it’s akin to bracing oneself for impact (as in an untrained person in a fight) rather than integrating an attacker’s blows into forward flow (as in a trained martial artist). So in other words, to establish a pure locomotive rhythm, a subject dog that has projected its e-cog into another dog, perceives their shoulder tension as resistance to their capacity to reacquire a locomotive rhythm and convert the energy of stimulation into pure forward motion.

When dogs mark an object with urine they are not declaring status or delineating territory. They are (1) seeking relief from the tension of being stimulated and not yet being able to move freely, and (2) from the systems point of view they are objectifying this threshold, anointing an object as a common point around which the interactants can align and synchronize so as to collectively move themselves toward a pure locomotive rhythm. One could say that their two respective centers-of-gravity are beginning the process of merging into one collective emotional center-of-gravity (H+); the fulcrum for the system they are going to create through their collectivized movements. Objectification of the threshold into a midpoint (which could be a stick, a toy, a raised surface, a puddle of water, a scent post), makes it easy for the more sensitive dog in the interaction to move, relieve itself and thereby soften physically and emotionally.

(-) ——————————-> (H+) <———————————– (-)

Dog A Midpoint Dog B

Both dogs can project into this common object of attraction and not feel resistance toward it. They were attracted to each other from the start, but were not yet able to absorb each other’s emotional momentum until being able to move concertedly about the objectified midpoint, which allowed them to feel a reduction of shoulder tension by synchronizing their actions with the other individuals. Urine as a preyful essence ABSORBS emotion that’s projected and seeing the other dog move and then moving in kind CONDUCTS the emotional momentum. Thus they expose their genital area to the (tree/post/tuft) as an indirect means of making contact with the other, with the reduction in bladder tension lessening a sense of emotional pressure and maximizing a feeling of sensuality (hunger for contact) over sensitivity (fear of falling). The good feeling engendered by moving and urinating they attribute to the other’s negative, and so now they’re engaging in an auto-tuning/feedback loop which is why we don’t see aggression with dogs intent on marking. Whereas if were true that dogs urinate to declare status or territory, logically this should increase aggression. (Imagine sitting on a park bench and a stranger comes up to you and declares ownership of your bench. That would induce hostility rather than agreeableness.) If conventional wisdom is that dogs mark things with their urine to declare status and/or ownership, then we would have to say that once dogs advertise a claim then other dogs are always agreeable to who has what status and rights to which territory. And this would mean that dogs are cooperative rather than competitive and which immediately contradicts the thesis that dogs mark things and areas in a competition for status or territory. It’s a self-annihilating logic loop. The more logical explanation is that dogs mark things to reduce pressure and reacquire their locomotive rhythm because they are social by nature, that sociability is predicated on the locomotive rhythm as a metric of well-being, and that interactions between animals is a function of the Constructal law, incorporating objects of resistance into the configuration as an improvement of flow.

We think of thermodynamics as something hopelessly abstract and inaccessible. But when it comes to behavior all it means is that if things aren’t moving, things are getting hot. So because of thermodynamic realities wherein an individual needs to reacquire the locomotive rhythm after being destabilized by a stimulus, the long term “goal” in any interaction is to objectify this threshold. Once the midpoint is manifest, it makes a process of differentiation {one individual coming to occupy the (-) pole and the other the (+) pole) around an H+ value } infinitely easier. The most active expression of this process is a dog grabbing a stick in its mouth and then dashing off to be chased by the other. Another common one is establishing a “safe” place as in under something, or a puddle of water, or getting up on something raised. This process of differentiation is also what’s going on when animals are supposedly competing over a resource. In reality they are differentiating so that one individual will come to occupy the (-) pole, and the other will complement it by coming to occupy the (+) pole, and with the contested object in question (H+) serving as the precipitating agent for these two respective values. (Therefore I call these “resources” objects-of-connection.)

Once the process of “emotional ionization” is complete, one individual has “emotional momentum” to give, this is the one acting as the predator, and the complementing individual has emotional momentum to absorb, this is the one acting as the prey. And paradoxically from our intellectual perspective, the socially stronger dog will gravitate to the preyful polarity, not the predatory one. This isn’t incongruent from an energetic interpretation of behavior which notes that the prey “controls” the predator, not the other way around. If there isn’t a void (+) energy has nowhere to go.

With the reduction of tension with the initiation of differentiation, interactants now realize much greater motor control over their movements because they have objectified the threshold which separates the two prime emotional values, Predator and Prey, which are the first two Temperament traits that evolved in the emotional makeup of living beings given that the Predator and Prey relationship is the oldest relationship between living beings. They are able to respond in a fine tuned way relative to what their prospective partner is doing because they are mapping an environmental threshold

Point A ———————> / Point B

onto its body just as if they are clearing an obstacle in order to get somewhere. The relationship of the individual’s Predatory Aspect to its Preyful Aspect which is reflected in how the body is configured and deports around its p-cog, i.e. its body language)

[ (-) / (+) ]

With this transformational projection, they are able to map their locomotive rhythm onto the body mechanics of the other dog. They feel as if the other dog’s p-cog is moving within them, they are now directly wired into what’s going on within their prospective partner. This means that to keep their own internals moving smoothly, they must move in a way that keeps their partners’ internals processing smoothly, an auto-tuning/feedback loop that they can delicately inflect being that they’re sensually attuned to the other dogs’ center mass. They are becoming emotionally coupled.

The key to this feedback loop is again the locomotive rhythm, the organisms’ internal metric of well being. The locomotive rhythm is characterized by an output (all four legs extended) and an input (all four legs retracted) in equal yet opposite counterbalance. An individual can only extend its reach as far as the body can then recollect itself above the new position of its center-of-gravity. The two phases must always be in an equal and opposite state of counterbalance so that output equals input, and vice versa. So once one individual has projected its emotional center-of-gravity into the form of a thing it’s attracted to, in order to reacquire its locomotive rhythm, it will move in a way that complements the other just as if the other being is the opposite phase of the locomotive rhythm, the other half of that wave action. This initiates an impulse to reciprocate in kind in the partner because they too have the same need to reacquire their locomotive rhythm. If one individual is in its output phase (predator pole), the other individual must be in an input phase (preyful pole), and then they must reverse these roles so that both can collect or project respectively to keep their internal locomotive rhythm going and retain the sense of remaining upright and in motion, i.e the feeling of being in flow.

The locomotive rhythm is a wave that moves through the body. That’s what physical motion is, an up and down action that the body rides, limbs and torso undulating in its motion. The dog associates this wave as the “reason” for its success in obtaining an object of attraction. The object is swept up into a rolling sequence of muscles tightening and releasing, incorporated into the feeling of a wave. This integration of the muscle and structural components of the body into one smooth motion, ties all the various autonomic processes of the body into this experience as well unleashing a matrix of Pavlovian Equivalencies by which the elements of the surroundings become tied together within the dog’s mind. For example, Pavlov’s dog didn’t salivate because he anticipated getting food, or was, strictly speaking, associating the bell with the food, rather, the dog felt that the act of salivation materialized the food. When someone brought him food, he didn’t construe it as a person walking across a room with the intention of bringing him some food. He felt that his act of salivation moved the person bearing food toward him.

When interactants become aware of their partner as an extension of their own body, they perceive their connection as a function of the same wave form that carries them about, their partner acting out the other half of the wave form. They see the world responding to how they are feeling. This involves the autonomic processes of their body that are intertwined with this as well, most especially breathing as this is the most dynamic function inherent in running fast. A deep and metered breath, the whole body as a resonating chamber, the lungs expanding and contracting as a bellows, is the same as running at full speed. Then the whole catalogue of Pavlovian Equivalencies kicks in, object of attraction synonymous with the physical center-of-gravity, muscle tension of the hind end equivalent with something soft in the jaw, equivalent with supple shoulders and flexible torso, etc., etc.. All of this in a pro-social dog is evoked simply by looking at the Object.

When in this state if the other interactant were to stop moving, for example either because it’s tired or became distracted, the collected partner may attempt to mount it due to the sensuality inherent in emotional coupling so that the running motor pattern is displaced into pelvic thrusting, or more likely if excited, will bark at it in order to reacquire the locomotive rhythm via a strong breathing mechanics. The Subject doesn’t bark to motivate the Object to move as if the Object moves about on its own power, rather the deep, metered breath of the Subject (strong wave action) is in its mind, the force that makes the Object move in the first place. In the animal mind what’s happening inside is what makes things happen outside. (On the other hand the human intellect occupies the polar opposite space in consciousness as in what happens outside is what causes what happens inside. This is because we use thoughts to tie elements of our surroundings together rather than the wave forms of physiological and physical action.) A dog throws out a bark just as it throws out a step, through the projection of the e-cog, only now once focused on its breath without actually moving forward because now it feels as if the Object is fully integrated into its sense of its own body.

Due to this auto-tuning/feedback loop arising from the phenomenon of emotional projection and the sense of emotional well-being as a function of the locomotive rhythm, we observe an innate tendency in dogs to synchronize their movements and move along a common arc because this is the easiest way to keep the two phases in equal/opposite counterbalance and maintain their respective experiences of flow. The object-of-connection (the so-called resource) serves as an external manifestation of each one’s p-cog. Indeed it looks like two dogs are competing for something but in fact since they are both emotionally rooted into the object as an indirect means of making contact with each other, until they are moving toward an optimal rhythm there will be friction. What mitigates friction degrading into violence is that to reacquire a feeling of well being they must reconcile their manner and movement with the manner and movements of the other dog. The locomotive rhythm incites sociability.

The dog that opts for the preyful position is not showing respect or trying to appease the dog that looks to us as trying to assert itself over the other. Rather he is reliving positive physical memories of collecting himself for a later expression of emotional momentum. He may even be doing this under a state of great duress and thus presenting the picture of a hapless and pathetic body language, but deep, deep down even an overly “submissive” dog is taking an immediate-moment pleasure of gathering himself for release. The more confident dog at the other end of the temperamental spectrum is doing the same but with great élan, so we misinterpret this dynamism for dominance, but we will see that over the course of time our so called submissive individual will start to gain more and more confidence in its “sniveling” approach and to such a degree that it will rush toward a “dominant” the moment it gets a whiff of tension in the air and immobilize it with intense whining and face licking, all of which sensualizes and hence paralyzes that individual. The “submissive” is being actively aggressive with its so called passiveness.

So from our intellectual perspective it looks as if an individual when it holds back is deferring an immediate-moment impulse for a later gratification, but in his mind he is already experiencing a positive flow and isn’t waiting for anything. Social interactions have a system’s logic, not an individuated one, with physical memories providing the complementary states that allow the two individuals to fit as one; physical memories when they are regressed to the core p-cog smooth wave experience, inform in the moment.

Social interactions, just like physical interactions, are at bedrock transfers of momentum. The process initiates with an individual’s drive to regain its emotional equilibrium once stimulated and then bring the subsequent force of acceleration back to neutral. If this force of acceleration can be expressed through an optimal locomotive rhythm, then the dog feels connected to the object of its attraction because along the way he has become emotionally entrained so that it can’t reacquire an optimal locomotive rhythm unless its partner achieves this as well. If during the course of their interaction THE TWO PHASES OF LOCOMOTIVE RHYTHM, the output and the input, BECOME EQUAL, THEN YOU HAVE COLLECTIVIZED MOTION, one example being WHAT WE CALL PLAY. It’s not something complex, it’s something confusing clarified when it has been reduced to something simple:

(-) / (+)

When dogs compete over resources or when they play, we’re witnessing a universal process wherein two or more individuals differentiate according to a principle of thermodynamics, a template available to all animals, but because of its evolution as a group hunter, the dog of all animals has the highest emotional capacity and is thus able to map this primordial template with its direction of flow

(-) —— / —–> (+)

Drive To Make Contact By Way of Feel

onto situations (search and rescue, bomb/narc detection, car rides, obedience trials, herding, police service, protection, handicap assist, etc., etc..) that other species find hopelessly complex as it is impenetrable to their instinctive manner of apprehension. They can’t reduce their senses to apprehend the wave form based on two bodies configuration around their respective center masses.

We could consider the Bekoff ABC video from the perspective of the locomotive rhythm as the metric of well being.

The Dane and the smaller brown dog engage and a state of tension arises between them, and within them, just as if they are being raised to a height. They are building up an internal force. They are both perceiving the shoulder tension in the other as an impediment to the flow of force. Then the big dog stomps the ground and this quick movement and lowering of the shoulder collapses the state of tension and which is immediately followed by the Dane collecting himself onto his hind end and extending his rump into the air, the “bow” motion. This move addresses the fundamental thermodynamic question around which the animal mind is configured, which direction is force going to flow. This collecting move of the input phase of the locomotive rhythm absorbs the force of impact WERE THEY TO COLLIDE. The Dane is not inviting the other dog to play as why for example would a bow constitute an invitation to play? Rather the Dane is displaying he can absorb the emotional momentum that the brown dog has projected into him. He collects himself, shifts his own internal momentum because he can feel that going forward won’t render a pure locomotive rhythm given the brown dog’s body tension.

The play bow serves to absorb the brown dog’s “fall;” i.e. it channels the brown dog’s acceleration (disturbance of equilibrium) into emotional momentum (emotionally grounded into the body of the Dane) so that the little dog feels absorbed by the big dog. The play bow IS NOT INTENTIONAL on the Dane’s part but rather reflects that they are switching from two respective individuated points of view to a systems logic, a group energy. The play bow is not signaling “I want to play.” Rather, the lowering of the head (predatory aspect) and the raising of the hind end (preyful aspect) transmutes the Dane into an emotional ground for the other dog and this makes the other dog feel absorbed and safe. The brown dog has projected its p-cog and mapped its locomotive rhythm onto the Dane (this has already occurred for the Dane which is why he can shift his momentum rearward) and so this begins the process of feeling safe enough to make physical contact and the brown dog rushes forward in a short burst of movement.

The most important clue in this video is when the brown dog goes forward almost immediately he winces and braces for impact by turning his head. He’s feeling absorbed, which is why he has gone forward, but only to a point, there are some physical memories of “crashes” embedded in his e-cog as well and so he doesn’t yet feel that the Dane can wholly CONDUCT the force of acceleration he’s invested with. Subsequently in the next sequence the brown dog dissipates the excess force that he isn’t able to transfer directly to the Dane into some side-to-side and running-in-place movements. The two dogs are trying to reacquire their optimal locomotive rhythm and because of the phenomenon of acceleration when a frame of mind collapses, which then induces a need to be absorbed, a systems’ logic takes over because the only way they can each reacquire their locomotive rhythm is by becoming aligned and in sync so that they achieve it in tandem, what we otherwise call playing. An object-of-connection (H+) facilitates this process exponentially.

So what’s the distinction between this interpretation and the so called signaling of intention? Why does the Dane play bow if not to invite the other dog to join him? Why couldn’t we say the Dane is signaling that he can absorb the other dog’s momentum?

The Dane isn’t inviting the other dog to play, rather, due to the overpowering influence of physical memories, and an obvious history of positive social experiences, he’s ALREADY IN PLAY and is gathering his energy for a prey-making pounce, the move backwards that shifts his weight onto his hind end, not only gathers force but simultaneously inhibits the motor impulse to spring forward. He isn’t signaling, he’s already playing and because the projecting predator pole is occupied by the brown dog (-), he flips to the collecting preyful pole (+) in order to fit into the same frame of reference and satisfy the ever present thermodynamic strictures on how energy is to move. The Dane knows this by his sensual feeling aroused by the brown dog’s shoulder tension, which arose from his subliminal focus on his hind end while his focal gaze is enraptured by the preyful aspects of the brown dogs’ body. The primal impulse of collecting force inhibits the primal impulse of projecting force.

Because of his positive social experiences and good nature, the Dane is able to focus on the dog’s physical center-of-gravity, its center mass, rather than becoming FIXATED on its eyes. He is aroused by the other dog’s body, he is feeling sensual, he’s not going by the form of the dog but rather by how the dog is configured around its center mass. And since the other dog is projecting force toward him he can immediately feel that the dog isn’t prepared to absorb his momentum, thus the Dane checks himself with the positive physical memory of collecting-rearward-for-the-spring-forward-when-the-moment-is right. The Dane can feel that it wouldn’t feel good to rush toward the other dog because this would collapse the sensual feeling that he is already enjoying.

Why is being collected self-reinforcing? In the animal mind, potential energy is a more powerful motivation and reinforcement than the actual realization of energy. The process of attaining an object of attraction is more rewarding than actually possessing said object (hence dogs love to drop their toys into hard to reach places).Therefore when a prey is seized in its jaws, the predator gives the collecting phase of the locomotive rhythm credit (the potentiating of the body with muscle tension) for the resulting success (just as a marksman gives the moments of holding his breath and taking aim credit for the placement of the round), rather than the springing forward phase. In early litter experiences puppies are being imprinted with collecting as the source of the fun derived from playing, and this quickly amplifies into a pronounced play bow display (which really should be called collecting). In other words, there is a built in bias in the emotional makeup of an animal towards sociability given the locomotive rhythm as the metric of well being.

The welling-up collecting phase of the locomotive rhythm serves as the basis for bite inhibition and deferred gratification because it is as primal as projecting and is actually more rewarding. Furthermore because the animal mind associates muscle tension in its hind end, the source of its propulsive force, with something soft in its mouth, a Pavlovian Equivalency, when a dog senses something sensual about the other dog (preyful aspect), it wants to collect itself to acquire muscle tension and it thereby already feels as if it has something soft and warm in its jaws. It’s been regressed to a puppy state of mind.

Because this simple code, the capacity to map the locomotive rhythm onto complex objects-of-resistance, is the predominant basis of the canine mind, far more than it is with any other species, is why only the dog can be protection trained and not end up psychopathically violent as would happen to a cat, or more revealingly to a primate, the latter being particularly telling since it has a far more evolved brain and theoretically, were the current paradigm of modern behaviorism correct that cognition is the basis of the high social virtues and the capacity to inhibit primal impulses, should be MORE ENABLED to restrain itself than the far more primordial dog. The properly trained protection dogs gains self control through the process because the collecting phase is amplified even more.

If Frans De Waal is right, then I believe my application of the Constructal law to the canine mind is the best interpretation of how the motor system would be engaged in emotional experience and the nature of animal behavior. When this rhythm is mapped onto another being, the feedback-tuning loop requires that the individual will try to optimize its internal rhythm by syncing up and aligning with how the object-of-resistance conducts itself. The subject is trying to configure its body around the e-cog it’s projected into the object’s body. Thus how a dog responds to others is how it collects its body around a new point in Time.

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]]>Many owners of aggressive dogs have visited my farm and done “Trolley Work;” what I also call “Maple Sugaring” wherein we burn off the stress that makes two dogs want to fight each other by running them along parallel trolley lines and thereby get down to the sweet nectar of pure attraction whereafter the dogs are able to make social contact. Many owners find the initial phases with the gnashing of teeth and baring of fangs quite shocking only to be even more stunned when they next see their dog try to play with the other dog that they thought it was trying to hurt but a moment earlier. What they were witnessing was a state of blocked attraction (distress) becoming an open channel (flow).

But of course there’s nothing new under the sun, we’re merely tapping into a primordial, core dynamic, one that I’ve invested in every aspect of Natural Dog Training and in particular the Core Exercises. See what happens when dog meets deer below.

It is my theory that all behavior is a function of attraction and that therefore behavior can only be explained in terms of a physics, not by way of a human psychology. The “locomotive rhythm” is the key. (See page 86 of “Design In Nature” by Adrian Bejan) It’s the basis of Constructal Law and I contend is an animals’ internal metric of well-being and the veritable baseline of animal consciousness. I call the locomotive rhythm the “Constructal Link” between brain and body, it’s how the body plugs the brain into the mind.

When an animal is stimulated it wants to move. This invests its mind with a degree of “emotional momentum.” Movement is the motive. The movement of the body’s mass is an actual physical force that conforms to the principles of physics. And if an animal can move in a manner consonant with its locomotive rhythm, i.e. their anatomical style of fast and efficient movement, then the underlying attraction feels complete merely by virtue of being able to move in a manner that is commensurate with the degree to which they feel attracted. This is the basis of an emotional bond. The Constructal link as the internal metric of well-being.

Physical movement is an energy of momentum and is transferred via the Constructal law by way of laminar (alignment) and turbulent (synchronization) transfers of force. We can see in the video above two points of turbulence (these points become the synchronizing elements, or “midpoints”) as defined by the fence posts, and then the long, laminar exchanges of momentum as dog and deer race along side each other. Note that as the group run proceeds, the dog visibly softens, he is feeling connected to the deer because his degree of attraction is being consummated by physically aligning at full speed and then syncing up with the deer at the end points. The deer is leading the dog, it collapses the turbulence at the end points (the dog’s tail wagging is a turbulent behavior that is a manifestation of the locomotive rhythm when it’s not running) and then the deer initiates the alignment phase of their interaction by stomping its forelegs and then finally determines when it’s had enough (dissipated its emotional momentum) and so the game is over. In a flow system the prey “controls” the predator, and the predator/prey dynamic is the basis of all emotional attraction which is why this trans-species form of communication between a deer and a dog is possible.

The transfer of emotional momentum via the Constructal Law is a universal trans-species form of communication. Nothing could be simpler and we need not invent any human narrative psychology to make sense of a dog running alongside a deer. I think it’s easy to see from this video how dog and man could have co-joined to herd prey species rather than simply hunting them. The video shows us the primordial code by which all animal behavior and social structure is moderated and Neo-Darwinian evolutionary logic or learning by reinforcement theory cannot account for this interaction and seriously distorts the nature of the animal mind because it doesn’t articulate it as a flow system.